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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

Is the Go "specification" considered a normative spec, like ECMASCRIPT spec? And AFAIK the C++ draft also covers the std lib.

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Unless the C++ draft is 90+% stdlib, it's still quite a difference in size (printed, which would not be a good way to use it, the Go spec is 90 pages). And I'd consider it normative, though not to the point of "spec wins if the spec and the toolchain disagree".

If the spec and an implementation disagree, there is a bug in one or the other. (There are multiple implementations of the language.) The Go spec is not entirely normative in that a disagreement between it and the implementation may be resolved in favor of the later. It is normative in that you should be able to implement the entire language from the spec alone.

I'm not sure Go has a spec. The page says spec, but the content says its the reference manual. So I'm guessing it's more focused on learning how to use the language then on writing an alternative implementation of it.

https://golang.org/ref/spec certainly is a specification of the Go language.

Whenever a difference is found between the two Go compilers, gccgo and gc, the spec is consulted to see which is right. If the spec is not clear on which compiler is right, then the spec is changed so it is.

When the third frontend was written (go/parser and go/types in the standard library), the spec played a similar role. Though far fewer changes were made to the spec, suggesting it is getting pretty good.

Oh, that's good to know. I'm happy to hear it is trying to be a language with a formal spec.

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