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ameliaquininglast Sunday at 8:31 PM1 replyview on HN

I half-agree with this. People occasionally argue that, e.g., Rust won't be suitable for production use until it has two fully independent mature implementations, and I consider this a silly requirement that doesn't serve any real purpose. On the other hand, once multiple separate implementations are already in widespread use, there's immense value in working out a least common denominator of language features and standard library APIs that work everywhere, so that library authors can write portable code that users of any implementation can depend on.

Of course, it's always possible that the standardization body doesn't in practice do a very good job, as seems to maybe be the case with the C++ committee. Also, I'm only talking here about technical considerations, not governance ones.


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jamesfinlaysonlast Sunday at 11:39 PM

> On the other hand, once multiple separate implementations are already in widespread use, there's immense value in working out a least common denominator of language features and standard library APIs that work everywhere

Yeah this was what I thought. I remember Valve Software wrote a paper about cross platform development and said it was useful compiling with Visual C++ and gcc to shake out any iffy syntax that worked in one but not the other. Of course with performance-critical code and code that needs to run on consoles as well there will always be platform-specific stuff, but if you can get 99% of the code working across multiple compilers that's pretty good.