Wirth was the role model for leanness. These days, it makes sense to be skeptical, because people no longer even realize how little it takes to build something. Maybe that mindset will make a bit of a comeback now that storage is so expensive.

Why are all source files in the root folder

I don’t want to dive into subdirectories to see the source code. My projects are usually lean, so it’s affordable to have all sources on the top level.

Am I reading correctly about the benchmark being way bellow C

The report is from April. I will provide updates when I find time. The native backends are mostly stack-based and there is no optimizer, so 1.5 - 2 times slower than GCC -02 is to be expected. The interpreter is now close to the LuaJIT interpreter performance. Next year I will likely implement register based backends, or try to reuse GCC 4.7 as an optimizer and backend. But it’s not a priority. The book explains why.

Limitations of the language feel not attractive for application development

It’s a systems programming language, as C or C++.

There is a textbook where you find everything relevant about the language including how to implement an operating system in less than 200 pages. I don’t see an advantage in going away from Github, but you can do a fork and store it on your favorite service.

Lean means different things in this project. First and foremost it’s the language itself is lean, as was Oberon. The specification of Micron is not much larger than Oberon’s and still supports all relevant features of C, some features of Go and even C++. And the textbook describing Micron plus an operating system for RISC-V implemented in Micron is less than 200 pages. Second, there is no “large dependency”. Everything Micron requires next to a C++98 compiler is under my control, even the build system. There is even an IDE with only ~3kSLOC.