Minnow is a concurrent programming language with a Ruby-like syntax. It compiles to an executable and uses a companion library to allow fully-rebalanced microthreads. Minnow gains a lot of strength from its actor model, which uses message passing, as opposed to threads and locking, as its concurrency model. Taking a cue from Erlang, actor creation and message passing is extremely lightweight (often on the order of a few nanoseconds). The language has a built-in foreign function interface that allows developers to leverage existing C-based libraries in a simple SWIG-like manner. Minnow's object model is based on "melding" features together to form objects.