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pcwalton's profile
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
@pcwalton

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
pcwalton.github.io
Joined November 2009

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    Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 2 Jul 2019
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    Unpopular opinion: What it means for a language to “have a spec” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless in practice.

    6:36 PM - 2 Jul 2019
    • 5 Retweets
    • 60 Likes
    • Matheus Bernardo 🇧🇷 johnny Dmitry Rusakov Gary Trakhman Mazdak Farrokhzad Keshav Kini MBL Bruce Its burn down Polyvios Pratikakis
    10 replies 5 retweets 60 likes
      1. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 2 Jul 2019
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        For instance: The C++ specification, the Go specification, and the Definition of Standard ML all have wildly different goals and style, despite all three being “specs”.

        5 replies 4 retweets 35 likes
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      2. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt‏ @samth 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        I think this is a general point about software specification: both that there are a wide variety of kinds of specs, and that the line between specification and documentation is hard to make precise.

        1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
      3. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @samth

        Yeah, it’s a case in which Rust gets punished for doing the conservative thing. Most other languages would just call the Rust Reference a “spec” and call it a day, but the bar that Rust has historically set for a “spec” is probably so high it will never be reached.

        1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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      2. Miguel de Icaza‏ @migueldeicaza 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        Spoken like someone that works on a language without a spec.

        1 reply 3 retweets 28 likes
      3. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @migueldeicaza

        Rename the Rust reference to the Rust “specification” and you have something basically equivalent to the Go specification.

        2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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      1. JF Bastien‏ @jfbastien 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        My language has plenty of speckpic.twitter.com/besex63fH3

        0 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
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      1. corvus frugilegus‏ @glaebhoerl 3 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        need a spec for "have a spec" :(

        0 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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      1. Pär Björklund‏ @Paxxi 3 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        I'd say that it's not a spec unless it's either standardized or someone has built a conforming alternative implementation. Until then it might be an excellent document but it's not really been tested

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      2. Allan Wirth‏ @Allan_Wirth 2 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        I agree that Rust has a better spec than a lot of other languages that have "specs". The big question for me is what would need to be done to make "behavior considered unsafe" https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-undefined.html … not depend on LLVM's (unspecified afaik) equivalent.

        1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      3. Gabriel Parmer‏ @__gparmer 3 Jul 2019
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        Replying to @Allan_Wirth @pcwalton

        Wow, I didn't know this. That is...not great.

        1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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