Modula-3 was conceived as a successor to Modula-2. It was designed by Luca Cardelli, Jim Donahue, Mick Jordan, Bill Kalsow and Greg Nelson at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center and the Olivetti Research Centre. Its main features are simplicity and safety while preserving the power of a systems-programming language.

The language features:

  • Modules and interfaces
  • Explicit marking of unsafe code
  • Automatic garbage collection
  • Strong typing
  • Objects
  • Exceptions
  • Threads
  • Generics

Several compilers are available, many of them open source.