With 7.1 the SDK becomes a complete product of its own: the runtime floor ships as its own package under a licence written for toolchains, your emitted programs link no Mica standard library, and a compiler you build on Dragon installs and works without the Mica compiler anywhere on the machine.
The engine that compiles Mica — control-flow analysis, SSA middle-end, storage placement, register allocation, native emission — is now something you can build a compiler against. Here is what it is, why we published it, and where it goes.
After three years as one program, the Mica compiler now has the architecture it always claimed to have: a foundation, an intermediate language, a backend engine, and a frontend — with walls between them a build system enforces. The proof is a second language: Wirth's PL/0, compiled to native code by Mica's own backend, checked against Wirth's own machine.
A three-line mica.project beside your sources tells the compiler and the editor the same truth: which files form the program, which encoding they speak, and which libraries they consume — and one program can now import several separately built libraries.
mica --run compiles and executes one source file in a single command — millisecond compiles, full checks, argv and exit codes the way a shell expects them, shebang support, and automatic use of your project's libraries. Compiled-language speed with scripting-language ease.
The preview of 6.12.5, which carried two features that belong together: the project file the compiler and the editor both read, and the run mode that makes one Mica file as easy to run as a script. Both have since shipped.