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A comment on Go support for Android. Parent comment

Re:Go support for Android by ahoge on Saturday June 21, 2014 @05:15AM (#7924537)
Go also has documentation. Also, Go has a spec. Swift doesn't. That's a pretty big deal, don't you think?

Android is fairly open. You can run whatever you want on that platform. If you want to use LuaJIT, no one can stop you.

Also, this isn't "Google". It's one guy working for Google. He's on the Go team. He wants to make Go a viable option for games on Android.

If you like Go, this is a good thing.

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Re:Go support for Android by pjmlp on Saturday June 21, 2014 @10:44AM (#7925099)
Swift has a spec. Just go to Apple developers documentation.
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Re:Go support for Android by ahoge on Saturday June 21, 2014 @11:20PM (#7926797)
I can't find a language specification anywhere. Can you give me a link?

go language spec hit #1:

http://golang.org/ref/spec

dart language spec hit #1:

https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/

java language spec hit #1:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/

For Swift, I can only find guides and references.

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Re:Go support for Android by pjmlp on Sunday June 22, 2014 @04:59AM (#7927293)
At one click distance for any Mac developer:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

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Re:Go support for Android by ahoge on Sunday June 22, 2014 @06:11AM (#7927420)
From the very first paragraph:

"The grammar described here is intended to help you understand the language in more detail, rather than to allow you to directly implement a parser or compiler."

A language specification is for people who want to implement a parser/compiler/VM/etc. It's something you need if you want to standardize it (e.g. TC39 [ECMAScript] and TC52 [Dart]).

A language specification is also generally clearly labeled as such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_specificat...

PHP, for example, doesn't have one.

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Re:Go support for Android by pjmlp on Sunday June 22, 2014 @07:02AM (#7927528)
Ah, so you mean a formal language spec, not an informal one.

Edit: I forgot to mention that both Go and Java lack ECMA and ISO specs.

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Re:Go support for Android by ahoge on Sunday June 22, 2014 @11:29PM (#7930079)
Yes, a language specification is just a prerequisite for standardization. However, it's also useful for people who want to write their own implementation or tools. It also makes issue handling a bit smoother, because you can always check what the spec says if two bits of the ecosystem disagree with each other.
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