Are there any languages for which international standardization processes have not been either tombstones (like Smalltalk, repeatedly) or vehicles for inter-corporate bullying?
We're zombies!? Actually, that's kinda cool.
You can consider the Smalltalk image as a single program, with branching, mutating clones, which has been running continuously, modulo suspending (image save) since sometime in the 1970s. Maybe that's where our unkillable, repeatedly come-back-from-the-dead nature comes from?
(You can't build a Smalltalk-80 image from scratch because of "strange loops." We've been doing binary transformations to pre-existing images all this time! Even the Squeak image was produced this way. (Dolphin image as well, I believe))
But back to "standards." The Smalltalk standard was pretty wimpy for most if its iterations. It was a watered-down inter-corporate Détente. Not sure about the most recent one.
Wow! You mean a Squeak image can't be fully built from source?
That's kind of... scary.
It also reminds me of how we do Plone upgrades... I always cross my fingers.
Lots of things in Smalltalk evoke that reaction. But while others get to tremble in fear of imagined disasters, we Smalltalkers get to know the truth: that lots of the "conventional wisdom" is nonsense!
You could sort of say the same thing about C, except that the "image" is a *nix partition.
There are some deliberate modifications. Like the "command line" array is whatever the command line was when the VM was re-invoked. Sockets deliberately aren't active for security reasons. But where the state isn't exactly the same, it's for a specific reason.
Even processes (green threads) are frozen halfway through, and continue chugging along when we return from snaphot!
"Well, there goes innovation in Ruby".
But they should advertise themselves as non-conformant to the standard.
My understanding is that the standard will largely be compliant with RubySpec, pioneered by Rubinius.