It was originally developed by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in the United Kingdom.
In the beginning of 2002 TenDRA was actively developed again by Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven and offered as a BSD-licensed open source project through the website tendra.org.
The TDF technology behind TenDRA has an academic history dating back to work on algebraic code validation in the 1970s.
[2][3] The goals of TenDRA.org are:[citation needed] The goals of Ten15.org added:[citation needed] Features of both compilers include good error reporting with respect to standards compliance and a smaller code size than the same programs compiled on gcc.
TenDRA uses the Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF), a specification created by the Open Group, as its intermediate language.