Rust needs an official specification
Rust needs an official specification
Can we currently reason about Rust code with absolute certainty? Not really, but we should be able to. In this article, we dive into the reasons why it may be time for a Rust specification.
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It's not as if nothing is being done on GitHub we have both: rust-lang/spec which is being folded into rust-lang/reference.
I'm not sure why we don't have an official spec, I assume that reference was originally for rustc in particular and might include some internal weirdness instead of being a proper spec. Kinda like how gcc has some internal magic that isn't strictly to C spec.
I guess what happened was: spec for rustc -> developed rustc -> ferrocene developed from rustc spec -> "we don't have a generic rust language spec"
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.
Most importantly it takes a lot of effort and is essentially outdated the moment it is done unless you slow down and complicated every other process by funneling every change through the spec first.