2 ms·

I wouldn't say it's a benchmark, but surely Pascal, Fortran and COBOL (to name but three) are all standardised?

steveklabnik 6y ago
There are more languages that have standards, sure, but the languages you mention, at this point, and in general, are mostly relegated to historical maintenance and maybe some very specific niches. To me personally, a “mature” language that’s not really being used isn’t the goal. And if developers truly believed standardization was valuable, you’d expect this property to give them a significant leg up against the sorts of languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, TypeScript, etc. That being said, I do think, considering it longer, there are languages that I am missing, like SQL, and ones that have a spec, even if it’s not under an ECMA/ISO process, like Java and Go, that I was forgetting. I still think that using this as a necessary condition for “maturity” is misguided.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  Well, I agree that standardisation and "maturity" (whatever that may mean) are not connected, but I think most C and C++ programmers (to name two very widely used languages that I personally have a lot of knowledge of) find the respective standards for those languages very helpful, and somewhat lament the lack of formal standards for other languages they may use.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Yes. I do think that standardization is generally good. I am pro Rust getting a specification! I just think it is one pro among many, and not something required for success.
  - moltonel3x 6y ago
    The C and C++ specs are full of UB though, more like a "minimum common denominator" for compiler devs than a strict spec that users can rely on. It's way too easy to write spec-abiding code that behaves differently with different compilers/architectures/optimizations. Specs are definitely a good thing to have, but often they're just brandished as a bullet point without looking at the details: how good is the spec, what does it add over the existing tests/CI/RFCs/proofs, etc.
IainIreland 6y ago
In a past life I worked on a COBOL compiler for IBM. There is a COBOL specification, but AFAIK nobody actually implements it fully. Implementations pick and choose new features based on customer demand. Also, COBOL is dominated by large legacy codebases, which means that if there's a discrepancy between an implementation and the specification, the users normally don't want it fixed, because they may have written code that depends on the "incorrect" behaviour and it's a lot of work to audit. IBM built a new backend for its COBOL compiler using the optimizer from their JVM. IIRC by the time I left it generated code that was ~2x faster than the old compiler, but uptake was still slow because of migration concerns. In particular, we spent a lot of time working on features to help guarantee that code with some forms of undefined behaviour would have the same result as the old version.

There are more languages that have standards, sure, but the languages you mention, at this point, and in general, are mostly relegated to historical maintenance and maybe some very specific niches. To me personally, a “mature” language that’s not really being used isn’t the goal. And if developers truly believed standardization was valuable, you’d expect this property to give them a significant leg up against the sorts of languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, TypeScript, etc. That being said, I do think, considering it longer, there are languages that I am missing, like SQL, and ones that have a spec, even if it’s not under an ECMA/ISO process, like Java and Go, that I was forgetting. I still think that using this as a necessary condition for “maturity” is misguided.

zabzonk 6y ago
Well, I agree that standardisation and "maturity" (whatever that may mean) are not connected, but I think most C and C++ programmers (to name two very widely used languages that I personally have a lot of knowledge of) find the respective standards for those languages very helpful, and somewhat lament the lack of formal standards for other languages they may use.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Yes. I do think that standardization is generally good. I am pro Rust getting a specification! I just think it is one pro among many, and not something required for success.
- moltonel3x 6y ago
  The C and C++ specs are full of UB though, more like a "minimum common denominator" for compiler devs than a strict spec that users can rely on. It's way too easy to write spec-abiding code that behaves differently with different compilers/architectures/optimizations. Specs are definitely a good thing to have, but often they're just brandished as a bullet point without looking at the details: how good is the spec, what does it add over the existing tests/CI/RFCs/proofs, etc.

IainIreland 6y ago

In a past life I worked on a COBOL compiler for IBM. There is a COBOL specification, but AFAIK nobody actually implements it fully. Implementations pick and choose new features based on customer demand. Also, COBOL is dominated by large legacy codebases, which means that if there's a discrepancy between an implementation and the specification, the users normally don't want it fixed, because they may have written code that depends on the "incorrect" behaviour and it's a lot of work to audit. IBM built a new backend for its COBOL compiler using the optimizer from their JVM. IIRC by the time I left it generated code that was ~2x faster than the old compiler, but uptake was still slow because of migration concerns. In particular, we spent a lot of time working on features to help guarantee that code with some forms of undefined behaviour would have the same result as the old version.