Tim Sweeney: “ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them ”

• clr_lite

  2 7 0.0 Rust

Last year I finished the school year early because of the coronavirus lockdown and had too much free time - so I wrote an interpreter for CLR bytecode (https://github.com/Leowbattle/clr_lite). The ECMA-335 standard contained everything I needed to know for that project: documentation of the EXE format, VM instructions, etc.

I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have been able to do it without free access to the standard. So I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards provide to hobbyist programmers.

• Folly

  90 27,072 9.8 C++

  An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.

  

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• abseil-cpp

  54 13,917 9.5 C++

  Abseil Common Libraries (C++)

  

Any specific examples come to mind? I usually find Folly [1] and Abseil [2] beat the standard library on almost every metric you can imagine, including the under appreciated compile time metric.

And then of course there's boost [3], but people have very mixed opinions about it.

The reason a lot of developers use the standard library in C++ is because dependency management in C++ such a nightmare that many people writing a library are forced to use the standard if they want any hope of adoption even when far superior options exist. It's literally something people writing C++ libraries will advertise "Dependency free header only library!" because they know without that a lot of developers won't bother using it.

Anyways, I would be interested to know what part of the standard library you find is better than third party options.

[1] https://abseil.io/

• python-iso18245

  1 47 5.4 Python

  Python implementation of the ISO 18245 Merchant Category Codes database ⛺

Similar story as you with ISO18245: the list of merchant category codes (4 digit codes that categorize the world).

I did pay for the standard. Thankfully there are public lists by visa, mastercard and stripe which also contain private ranges, so my published code shares not just the iso standard but also the matching entries in the other lists.

https://github.com/jleclanche/python-iso18245

• Vrmac

  45 104 3.6 C#

  Vrmac Graphics, a cross-platform graphics library for .NET. Supports 3D, 2D, and accelerated video playback. Works on Windows 10 and Raspberry Pi4.

> Access to hardware acceleration has absolutely nothing to do with the standards of the formats themselves.

I have implemented accelerated video playback myself https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo and I disagree. Needed a lot of these standards, not just for containers and audio, for video decoding too.

> since open implementations exist, open source developers know how the formats function.

These formats are way more complicated than you think they are. Just because open source implementations decode/encode something doesn't mean the implementation is standard-compliant. My one certainly is not.

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