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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

I would say that rust doesn’t have a formal specification, what it does have is close to or better than many languages “specs” with the “Rust Reference”: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference/

It really depends on how strictly you define the term specification. The Rust Reference is not required to be accurate. Though many other language compilers/implementations don’t fully implement their respective specs so, :shrug:.

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The Rust Reference is very far from being complete, or even correct in what it does cover.

If I have a question whose answer isn't obvious, it's far more likely that I have to go trawling around in RFCs than that there's an answer in the reference.

I think most languages of a similar age (eg Go, Swift) are doing better.

Rust is younger than Go (released in 2015 vs 2012) and way more ambitious, especially Rust 1.0 was released as kind of an MVP and many things have changed since then, which made the maintenance of such a reference an issue. The pace of change is slowing nowadays (that's especially visible if you look new and accepted RFCs), so I hope the reference will catch up eventually.

There are some people studying Rust with formal verification. For example in this paper https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/rbrlx/paper.pdf However I do not know if the whole language is covered or only a core.

The big gap with RustBelt is that it does not cover traits. This actually does matter: some bugs were missed because they interact with traits.

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