The Mica compiler is free to download and use for any purpose, including commercial work. No fee, no registration, no licence key, no time limit.

It is distributed under the Mica Compiler License, version 1.0 (MCL-1.0).

What you may do

Use it for anything. Personal projects, teaching, academic research, evaluation, and production commercial work are all covered by the same grant — we did not want a licence that makes you check which category you are in.

Install it on as many machines as you need.

Programs you compile are yours

We claim no rights whatsoever in the code you write or the binaries you produce. Distribute them, sell them, license them on whatever terms you choose. Shipping your own compiled program is not redistribution of the compiler, and no part of our licence attaches to your work.

What you may not do

Redistribute the compiler itself, or make it available to third parties — point people at mica-dev.com instead. Reverse engineer, decompile or modify the binary. Remove licence notices.

It is not open source

The compiler is commercial software and its source code is not published. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we would rather say so plainly than let you discover it after an evaluation.

That may change in future; nothing commits us either way.

Future versions

We may release future versions under different terms. If we do, the change applies only to versions released after it — the version you already hold stays licensed to you under the terms you received it with. We will not revoke that retroactively.

Open-source components

Two things we publish are open source, under their own licences:

  • the Visual Studio Code extension
  • the tutorial material

The MCL-1.0 covers the compiler and its standard library only.

Support

The licence includes no support or service commitment. Support and service agreements are available separately — write to info@mica-dev.com.

Teaching with Mica

Teaching use is covered by the same free grant, and we are glad to see the compiler used in coursework. A compiler that narrates its own reasoning — the lifetime class it proved for each allocation, the allocator it selected, the optimizations it applied and declined — is unusually well suited to a compilers or systems-programming course.

If you are teaching with Mica and need something the public material does not cover, write to us.