That’s actually not how any language has ever been written, though it’s easy to get that impression from how much the C and C++ communities emphasize their formal specifications.
But in fact, both languages were in production use for over a decade before they had a formal spec. And languages with formal specifications are actually a tiny minority of programming languages.
There is indeed a caveat in the introduction to the Reference that there may be statements in it that are specific to rustc. However, the authors strive to keep statements about the implementation separate from statements about the language.
The main reason there’s not yet an “official” spec is that creating one takes enormous time and money, which are always limited resources. (Note that both C and C++ had no formal standard for over a decade after their initial release.) The Reference is “good enough” to make a formal spec not strictly necessary, and the existence of Ferrocene makes it even less necessary, since anyone who absolutely needs a spec can use Ferrocene.
You can say the Rust implementation is wrong if it doesn’t conform to the Reference. That is not the same as “you personally disagree with the behavior.”
Rust’s guarantees about the behavior of safe code are far stronger than anything C or C++ provides, with or without a formal spec.
You’re not wrong, but not everything needs to scale to 200+ servers (…arguably almost nothing does), and I’ve actually seen middle managers assume that a product needs that kind of scale when in fact the product was fundamentally not targeting a large enough market for that.
Similarly, not everything needs certifications, but of course if you do need them there’s absolutely no getting around it.
In case you’re still interested in this type of resource, here’s another one I just learned about: https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/
It’s by the Android team at Google, and while it doesn’t require knowledge of C++, it seems to be intended to bring devs up to speed on the concepts required for using Rust in Android and Chromium.
Wow, I definitely should have google that myself before asking, but thank you for explaining and calling out that data point.
I honestly think that shows that it was in fact a bad idea to assign TLDs to countries. Having a country code acronym with a popular tech meaning is essentially just luck of the draw, so they’ve basically just arbitrarily given a few small countries a valuable resource to sell. I guess that benefits those countries, but I doubt “quasi-random fundraising for small countries” was ever the intent.
But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?
Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?
Obviously this isn’t specific to Rust, but frankly it’s bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it’s less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.
Yep, learned it recently from a list of things that are, surprisingly, named after real people. Deb and Ian eventually got married but are now divorced.
It’s so out of date that Deb and Ian are no longer together
(…this is actually true, not just a joke)
But “drop-in replacement”? That’s a strong and specific claim.
I do actually think that WebAssembly will enable something - maybe Rust, but more likely something simpler - to eventually dethrone JS in the browser. I also do think it seems beneficial to have your client and backend in the same language.
… the issue I have is people lying and saying Rust is a drop in replacement for js
I am genuinely curious whether you’ve actually seen this claim before, or if you badly misunderstood or are simply exaggerating a claim about Rust being a good language for web servers, or if you simply made this up as a straw-man. I can’t imagine anyone who knows what they’re talking about using those words I that order.
But how does the alternative solutions compare with regards to maintainability?
Which alternative solutions are you thinking of, and have you tried them?
Rust has been mentioned several times in the thread already, but Go also prohibits “standard” OOP in the sense that structs don’t have inheritance. So have you used either Rust or Go on a large project?
The O’Reilly book Programming Rust is very much targeted at C++ users, even if it isn’t explicitly marketed that way.
I read the first edition, which predated async Rust, so I can’t comment on how the second edition handles that topic. But the handling of everything else was, I think, excellent.
Modev says they’ve been using C for 25 years, and used Rust for several years as well! Their whole schtick baffles me.
I also hope that some of the people reading this realize that OP is also the person posting all of the “stop trying to suppress C” posts.
Rust feels like entirely the wrong target for that sort of criticism, especially regarding “energy and resource intensity”. Rust is well-known to be comparable to C in its efficiency.
I haven’t told you to keep calm. I’m just confused about you repeating the same points, in the same words, over and over, even after being told that you don’t have your facts correct.
I’m not saying you can’t learn or talk about other languages; I’m confused by the mismatch between your posts criticizing people for promoting newer tech stacks and the ones where you seem to be promoting newer tech stacks yourself.
25 years of experience is certainly enough to have strong opinions, but until your last comment I had the impression that you had a year or less of experience in C, hence my question.
This article somehow links to both the Reference and the Ferrocene spec, but still concludes that an official non-Ferrocene spec is necessary.
Why doesn’t the Ferrocene spec accomplish what the author wants? He states:
What? Why can’t the Ferrocene spec (and compiler) be used? Do Ferrocene and TÜV SÜD not count as “some group of experts”?
(Regarding the author’s opening paragraphs, the Reference does make the same distinction about drop scopes for variables versus temporaries, though I can see why he finds the Ferrocene spec clearer. But that doesn’t demonstrate that the Reference is useless as a stand-in for a specification.)