Hi, I am writing a compiler in pure Rust, I mentioned it to people and a lot of them said: Why did you pick rust? it's non standard, its not good for writing compilers .. And after googling, turns out they're apparently right! there's no spec for Rust.. I am very curious, why ? Why is there no…

Interesting and cool!! but sucks that normal rust is not "good enough" for "cybersecurity software" Tiny bit off topic, but this bit bothers me lol: and consequently we've become increasingly interested in better understanding and serving the needs of these customers of our language and of our to…

but sucks that normal rust is not "good enough" for "cybersecurity software" Says who? And why would this be the case? This has nothing to do with language specification. "customers", why not "users" ? I don't know, felt like a weird wording. Because it's a company...selling solutions to thei…

for normal "cybersecurity" its fine, and better than c/c++, what they mean is it isn't good enough for planes, cares, pace makers, critical infrastructure, etc. i am not sure about this, but normal c++ also isn't "good enough", it also needs special compilers and/or coding practices.

[image] farnz: The point of a specification is to provide an arbiter if a language user and a compiler author disagree That's the ideal, but in practice it seems largely to be a way for commercial entities (mostly compiler vendors) to protect themselves (in both good and bad ways) - hence the…

[image] MOCKBA: Oh boy, it pointed to hundred imperfections in my code. Sure. And any LLM can find more imperfections in my code, too. That's not the point. The point was this: [image] MOCKBA: AI will do that faster with better quality. Just write a good spec for AI and ten share the bui…

[image] khimru: ...write a language compiler purely on basis of specs without human ever touching the process... I was just watching a presentation about the history of Sqlite. Seems they have 250 thousand lines of code in Sqlite and over 600 thousand lines of tests. That hints at the idea t…

I think a standard is what you need when you have a complete mess in the first place. That said there are tricky evolving/unstable areas in Rust where it isn't completely clear (to me at least) where the language is going, but that has few practical consequences ( just stay away from those areas ).

[image] ZiCog: So much so that we might wonder if using the LLM to generate the code from it is really worth the bother. and expense. Yes, precisely. And very often writing tests is actually harder than writing both code and specifications. Just last year clang 22 broke our production code an…

Sure, if you can keep the subject relevant to the thread like that, but as much as I might agree with you, the financials of AI vendors are straying pretty far afield. More on topic, I suspect that if a spec alone could create a meaningfully compatible implementation one-shot (eg it's a novel langu…

Rust being non-standard affects compilers?

community

simonbuchan August 4, 2026, 9:02am 38

The AI discussion was already put to bed as off topic and derailing. Do not summon the Mods so carelessly, as they are wroth, and filled with cruel vengeance.

TWiR quote of the week

Topic		Replies	Views
Rust Spec and Implementations. Opinions? community	28	2501	November 27, 2023
How hard would it be to build a Rust transpiler that translates Rust to C? help	31	6791	January 24, 2023
Is there a plan to get a formal Rust language specification at some point?	35	7956	October 31, 2018
Adoption without traditional/formal standard community	16	1658	March 8, 2021
My dream language community	71	4292	December 7, 2023

Rust being non-standard affects compilers?

Related topics