Waqas Hussain wrote: > I propose that we start a small project to act as an aggregator for existing > open source implementations which could be used as references. Once we have > that going, an implementation selected for its readability could become the > (official?) reference implementation.
I like this idea, as long as reference implementations are published under a liberal (non-viral) license. Still, I want to argue against it because I think the standard specs are way more important. > 1. It would save people writing new implementations hours and hours of > guesswork Guesswork means the standards miss detail. > 2. It would make new implementations more interoperable, reducing the chance > of mistakes Not all implementers will fall back on the reference implementation, leading to probably less interoperability experience. > 3. It would make existing implementations more visible, improving the chance > of mistakes being found and reported, and implementations being reused Yes, given that feedback works. > 4. For experimental XEPs this would give direct evidence of how simple or > complex an algorithm is, what the edge cases are, and if it could be > simplified without losing its important characteristics Good point. > In fact I wouldn’t mind it being required that any XEP moving beyond > Experimental have implementations available for the algorithms it defines, > under a permissive license. > > I’m hoping to not be the only one who sees this as a problem we should > solve. What does everyone else think? Alternative proposal: link to all (open) implementations out there, not neccessarily reference implementations. That could improve interop as well. As a bonus, hint on the used license.
