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Comment by shakow | Hacker News Reader

> Because single implementation languages are toys

‶Toys″ like Go, OCaml, arguably Ruby & PHP, Perl, Erlang, Kotlin, ...

Go has a GCC implementation (which I use).

PHP has alternative VMs and specialized servers for serving it fast and in encrypted manner (they are closed sourced), tho.

Kotlin runs on JVM, which has at least three fully compliant implementations.

Erlang is a specialized language and telecommunications platform. It’s something different.

> PHP has alternative VMs and specialized servers for serving it fast and in encrypted manner (they are closed sourced), tho.

Well, if they are not public, it does not really have any influence on language specification.

> Kotlin runs on JVM, which has at least three fully compliant implementations.

And Rust runs on x86 which has myriad of implementations; still, we're talking about the language compiler, not the underlying runtime.

> Erlang is a specialized language and telecommunications platform. It’s something different.

How so? It's a language built over a runtime, just like Java. I don't see how the specifics of the runtime have to do with anything.

For PHP, there is HVVM which, AFAICT, can run vanilla PHP and is open.

TruffleRuby is a thing, as is JRuby.

Implementing Erlang without implementing its VM and the whole infrastructure, which is a much larger task than merely a VM like Python's.

HHVM dropped vanilla-PHP compatibility after PHP7 started coming close to it in performance (which was the top reason anyone used HHVM to serve vanilla-PHP code) - now they’re focussing on Hacklang which, no longer shackled by the need to be bug-compatible with PHP’s awful design decisions, is free to become a better language

Also artichoke ruby https://www.artichokeruby.org/

Kotlin is a prime example. You have to download the vendor implementation. There's no way to bootstrap. It's horrible from a tooling perspective.

Any single-implementation language inevitably degrades to the point where the implementation becomes the specification. Shortly afterwards, people can only use the language if their tool chain, operating system, etc. closely match the understanding of the language authors. That's a bad situation to be in.

I don't see how the bootstrapping problem is linked to multiple implementations.

> Shortly afterwards, people can only use the language if their tool chain, operating system, etc. closely match the understanding of the language authors.

Perl, well-known for being an iffy language to install and running on a restricted set of OS/architectures.

> ‶Toys″ like Go

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccgo/

Honestly curious, I know it exists, just like there used to be GCJ, but have you seen it being actually used?

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