On Jul 11, 2008, at 4:06 PM, Geoffrey Garen wrote:
Should a reference implementation, even if slow, count?
My own opinion on this is "no."
Since, for the most part, a reference implementation doesn't face the
performance and maintainability challenges that shipping software
faces, I don't think it fleshes out the same issues that a real-world
implementation would.
I happen to agree, but this means there's more than a shared test
suite in answer to Maciej's second question:
2) How is interoperability to be demonstrated? Do we accept good-
faith claims of support, or do we need a test suite?
If only a test suite were enough, then the RI would have to count.
The chicken-and-egg problems with prototype implementations and draft
specs suggest that we need all of tests, users banging on prototypes
and causing new (reduced) tests to be written, and of course specs
(ideally testable, which is the primary reason for the RI).
It will take nice judgment along with hard work to reach the point
where we believe the specs should be standardized. It's clear some
vendors won't want to risk implementing and shipping something that
has not yet been standardized. I don't want to over-formalize at this
point, but I'm happy to exclude the RI in the "Two interoperable
implementations" rule.
/be
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