Features
MiniD provides a small but flexible set of data types, similar to that of Lua's or Squirrel's. Unlike Lua, MiniD provides explicit support for object-oriented programming with classes. MiniD also provides a module system and coroutines as core language features, like Lua. MiniD is garbage-collected, with support for first-class functions, closures, and tail recursion.
MiniD also tries to be more robust than typical dynamic languages, making it easier to catch bugs sooner. For example, it does not have implicit variable declarations and accessing globals that do not exist throws an error instead of giving a default value (as in Lua). Another very helpful feature is "parameter type constraints," which are a way of specifying valid types that function parameters may accept. These checks are still performed at runtime unlike in static languages, but their concise syntax and negligible performance impact make them much more attractive and easy-to-use than similar solutions in other dynamic languages. They can help greatly in catching bugs that would cause functions to malfunction or corrupt data structures if called with unexpected parameter types. A small example is given below.
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