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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • 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:

    In other words, without a clear and authoritative specification, Rust cannot be used to achieve EAL5.

    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.)



  • 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’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.



  • 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.