Installing Mica

The Mica compiler is a single statically linked executable plus its standard library. It has no runtime of its own to install and no daemon to run.

Zero-install: the container

If Docker is available, nothing needs installing at all — the released compiler ships as a ready-to-use image for both x86-64 and ARM64, and docker pull selects your architecture automatically. New to Mica? The guided version of this path — empty folder to source-level debugging in fifteen minutes — is Get started with Mica.

docker run -it micalang/mica

The image carries the compiler, binutils and gdb, so compiling, running and debugging work immediately; C toolchains for work at the C boundary are one command away inside the container (mica-install-gcc, mica-install-clang).

It is also a ready-made VS Code dev container: with the Mica extension you get diagnostics, go to definition, hover and the document outline, and F5 compiles and debugs the file you have open under gdb. Copy .devcontainer/ and .vscode/ from gitlab.com/mica-lang/mica-container into your project — or clone that repository and “Reopen in Container” for the quickest first experiment. The image’s Dockerfile lives in the same repository.

Everything below is the native installation.

What you need

Two system packages, and nothing else:

On Debian or Ubuntu the package pulls both in automatically:

sudo apt install ./mica_<version>_<arch>.deb

The compiler binary itself is statically linked, so it has no library dependencies of its own — the two packages above are for the programs it produces, not for running the compiler.

Supported systems. 64-bit Linux with glibc, on x86_64 (x86-64-v3 or later — Intel Haswell, AMD Zen) or AArch64 (ARMv8.0-A). There is no Windows or macOS build; see platform and toolchain.

Download

Version 7.5.0, built from commit 45d7ae888. Verify a download with sha256sum against the hash above.

Install

# from the directory holding both .deb files
sudo apt install ./mica_<version>_<arch>.deb ./mica-dragon-rt_<version>_<arch>.deb

The compiler depends on mica-dragon-rt — the Dragon runtime its programs link — so the two install as one act; apt resolves binutils and libc6-dev for you. If you use dpkg directly, install the dependencies afterwards:

sudo dpkg -i mica_<version>_<arch>.deb mica-dragon-rt_<version>_<arch>.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

Check it worked

mica --version

Then compile something. Save this as Hello.mica:

program Hello;

imp
    WriteLn : std;

begin
    WriteLn("hello from mica");
end.

and build it:

mica --compile --link --optimize release \
     --platform linux,amd64,utf-8 \
     --source Hello.mica --build build
./build/Hello

You should see hello from mica. Substitute arm64 for amd64 on an AArch64 machine.

What gets installed

Installing mica also installs mica-dragon-rt, the Dragon runtime — the floor every compiled program links, packaged separately because the same floor serves programs produced by any compiler built on the Dragon backend. On disk, the pair looks like this:

/usr/bin/
└── mica                                       the compiler driver        (mica)

/usr/lib/
├── mica-stdlib-<arch>.a                       the standard library       (mica)
├── mica-dragon-rt-<arch>.a                  the Dragon runtime         (mica-dragon-rt)
├── mica-dragon-rt-fixedarena-<arch>.a         … freestanding memory class
├── mica-dragon-rt-mc-<arch>.a                 … multicore tasking
├── mica-dragon-rt-fixedarena-mc-<arch>.a      … both
└── mica-dragon-gpu-<arch>.a                   the device floor, linked when a tensor is placed on gpu

/usr/share/doc/
├── mica/copyright                             Mica Compiler License 1.0
└── mica-dragon-rt/copyright                   Mica Runtime License 1.0

You do not normally name any of these. The compiler resolves the right archives from the --platform, --memory-class and --tasking you ask for. Both are static: a compiled program is one self-contained binary, and the machines it runs on need no Mica package at all.

The Dragon SDK — the compiler’s backend as a C API, for building your own language on it — is a separate package under a different licence, with its own download and install page. The compiler alone will happily compile a program that imports the dragon surface — only the link asks for the SDK’s archive, and says so by name if it is not there.

The interop contracts and the standard library’s published import surfaces are part of the compiler binary and are not installed separately. Upgrading from 6.12.2 or earlier removes the /usr/lib/contracts/ directory, and upgrading from 6.12.3 or earlier removes the /usr/lib/mica-stdlib-utf-*.external files the older packages installed.

One thing that catches people out

The string encoding is fixed per binary, and the format specifier follows it. Under utf-8 a string is %s; under utf-32 it is %ls. Get it wrong and the compiler tells you exactly which specifier it expected — it checks format strings at compile time rather than letting a mismatch reach the output.

Building for the other architecture

Cross-compiling — producing an AArch64 binary on an x86_64 machine, or the reverse — needs the cross binutils, plus a user-mode emulator if you want to run the result:

sudo apt install binutils-aarch64-linux-gnu qemu-user-binfmt
export QEMU_LD_PREFIX=/usr/aarch64-linux-gnu

Then name the target architecture in --platform:

mica --compile --link --optimize release \
     --platform linux,arm64,utf-8 \
     --source Hello.mica --build build

You also need the standard library for that architecture, which means installing the package built for it.

See also

• Installing the Dragon SDK — the backend as a C API, a separate package under its own licence
• Platform and toolchain — targets, ABIs, build axes
• The facts sheet — every fact on one page, the AI surface included
• Licensing — free for any use, including commercial