Comment by vlovich123
2 days ago
Lots of things have standards that are mostly interchangeable. But pretending like the implementations don't interpret standards differently and have important differences is naiive. This is doubly so for language implementations which frequently leave things as "implementation defined". Clang and GCC have intentionally made significant efforts to minimize their differences which is why it's less noticeable if you're just swapping between them (it didn't start out this way). MSVC has not made these efforts. Intel abandoned their compiler for Clang. So basically you already have MSVC & clang/GCC as dialects, ignoring more minor differences that readily exist between clang and GCC.
Compare this with languages like Zig, Rust, and Python that have 1 compiler and doesn't have any of the problems of C++ in terms of interop and not having dialects.
Java is the closest to C++ here but even there it's 1 reference implementation (OpenJDK that Oracle derives their release from) and a bunch of smaller implementations that everyone derives from. Java is aided here by the fact that the JDK code itself is shared between JVMs, the language itself is a very thin translation of code --> byte code, and the language is largely unchanging. JavaScript is also in a similar boat but they're aided by the same thing as Java - the language is super thin and has almost nothing in it with everything else deferred as browser APIs where there is this dialect problem despite the existence of standards.
HN is a censorship haven and all, but I'd like to point out just one thing:
>Compare this with languages like Zig, Rust, and Python that have 1 compiler and doesn't have any of the problems of C++ in terms of interop and not having dialects.
For Python, this is straight up just wrong.
Major implementations: CPython, PyPy, Stackless Python, MicroPython, CircuitPython, IronPython, Jython.