Distributed under the licence of zlib/libpng, MiniD is free software.
MiniD began in June 2006 as an idea for a statically-typed language, much like a stripped-down version of the D programming language. This is the reason for the name "MiniD". After work began on the compiler, the creator, Jarrett Billingsley, realized just how large a project this language was becoming, and decided to recast the language into something simpler to implement. The result was a Lua-like language with a C-style syntax. Over the next several months, MiniD acquired features from various languages, such as Squirrel-like classes, a D-like module system, and Lua-like collaborative multithreading. On August 1, 2007, after more than thirteen months of planning and programming, version 1.0 of the reference implementation was released. The version 1.0 language specification is frozen.
As of June 15, 2009, version 2 of MiniD has been released. Version 2 brings a major reimplementation of most of the library in order to support its own garbage collector rather than relying on the underlying D garbage collector, for better behavior in realtime applications such as games. Version 2 also brings several changes to the language and standard libraries.
The development of MiniD was stopped in June 2011 and used as the base for new language called Croc by the same author.
