Mica for Visual Studio Code

The editor face of Mica, the deterministic AI systems language: notebooks whose outputs are verified facts, semantic highlighting and hovers answered by the compiler itself, one-click run and debug, and a runtime view in which the stopped program explains its own tasks and its autograd tape.

mica-dev.com · Language & compiler documentation · Blog · VS Code extension · YouTube

Mica is a statically typed systems language that compiles to native Linux x86-64 and AArch64 binaries. Training a network is ordinary Mica: tensors are types, the autograd tape is a language construct, and a run prints the same digits every time. This extension teaches Visual Studio Code the whole of it.

This version accompanies compiler release 7.5. That release adds no new sentence to the language and a great deal beneath it: performance measured on machines anyone can rent, memory brought down, checked builds on the optimizing lowering, and a compiler hardened by an adversarial sweep and by its own gates - the foundation the AI work stands on. The language server this extension talks to is that compiler, so everything it answers in the editor is what 7.5 knows. The place to learn Mica is the website: the Learn area walks from the first program to a GPT trained on a graphics card, the technical reports state the design whole, and the blog announces every release with its measurements. Follow the blog, and read this extension's change log for the editor's half of each release.

Here is the headline in one picture — a chapter of the AI course as a Mica Notebook, just after Verify Notebook re-ran every cell: each recorded output holds digit for digit, and the training run's falling loss is drawn as a sparkline under the digits that printed it:

Mica Notebooks

A Mica notebook is a plain markdown file (.mica.md) in which every ```mica fence is a cell holding one complete program and the ```output fence under it is a recorded fact. The file renders unchanged on GitLab and the website, and git diffs show edits and nothing else.

• Run a cell and the fresh output lands under it, through the installed compiler's own runner.
• Verify Notebook re-runs every cell and holds the fresh output against the recorded fence: a success mark for promises kept, a recorded-versus-this-run diff for drift, one summary line for the document. Verify proves outputs and never rewrites them.
• A loss-column sparkline draws the falling line of a training run directly under the output that printed it, from the printed digits.

Run, debug, and the runtime view

• Run File compiles and executes the current file like a script; Debug File stops on breakpoints with locals, stepping, and watch — the compiler emits full native debug information.
• The Mica Runtime view shows what the stopped binary itself narrates: the task tree with each task's state, every generator's suspension point, and the autograd tape's summary — read live from the process at every stop.

The editor

• Semantic highlighting — every identifier colors by what the compiler resolved it to, not by its spelling. tracked values render italic and code inside a tape window renders bold, so autograd code reads quietly different from plain arithmetic.
• Hover states the whole contract: a tensor's type with its shape — tracked matrix[64, 48] of float64 — and a fallible function's signature with its fails domain.
• Diagnostics appear when a file opens and on every save, at the exact positions the compiler reports; go to definition and the document outline ride the same resolved program.
• Glyph input — type \alpha for α, \times for ×, w_1 for w₁: the formula names the compiler accepts in source, offered as you type.
• Syntax highlighting for the complete current language, generated from the compiler's own lexical tables, with begin/end folding, automatic indentation, and word selection that understands 0x, 0b, and 1_000_000.

What works without what

The language features are provided by the Mica compiler itself running as a language server, so what the editor underlines is exactly what the build would report. The compiler is available from mica-dev.com/learn/install; a different location can be set with mica.languageServer.path. Without the compiler, the extension stays with highlighting and shows a single notice.

Extension settings

Licence

This extension is licensed under the MIT licence. The Mica compiler is a separate product with its own licence — see mica-dev.com.