[lifthrasiir]

Here the conformance refers to the Ferrocene language specification [1], which is being developed to be something akin to ISO/IEC 14882 for Rust in the future. In fact, this specification and the Ferrocene toolchain is meant to be ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 qualified, so it directly addresses your concern.

The comment posted by jamesmunns will do much better job in describing the exact details than mine (both comments happened to be posted within 20 seconds, huh), so I'll just add that standards are meaningless by their own. Quite a lot of people criticizing Rust for the lack of formal standards seem to assume that such standards will immediately improve something, but that's never true. Standards are meaningful only when they are maintained and can be enforced; many historical standards failed to catch up and fell into the oblivion for this reason. It doesn't even matter much whether the specification is written in "formal" prose [2]. I feel they are missing the fundamental reason why language standards can be beneficial in principle.

[1] https://spec.ferrocene.dev/

[2] Which is never "formal" in the mathematical sense. (Mathematically formal language specifications are quite rare, examples include SML and WebAssembly.) In fact, such formal writing is slightly better than informal writing only because such writing also aims to be unambiguous, and the formality itself is not that important.

[nurettin]

> Quite a lot of people criticizing Rust for the lack of formal standards seem to assume that such standards will immediately improve something

Formal standards aren't just for providing a spec to be used in alternative implementations or somehow proving that the syntax is logically sound.

They are also the process of international representatives vetting for new additions to the language or breaking backwards compatibility which is what I would be criticizing the lack thereof.

[lifthrasiir]

Most "international" standards are international only because the corresponding standard organization is ultimately operated by multiple nation-states. In reality the organization just appoints some experts to write the standard and brand it with their blessing, so the standardization process is hardly international. For language standards, those experts typically include original designers and whoever wanted to standardize the language. (Otherwise why would anyone want to join this tedious process?) A diverse group of experts is very rare for such standards.

It is another myth or fetishism that international standards have some inherent mechanism to ensure the compatibility. Such quality can be only maintained when standard editors take care of that and there is a comparable industry support. Missing any one, the compatibility can be easily broken, and conversely any specification---formally written or not---can maintain the compatability when both are satisfied.

[steveklabnik]

The Rust Project also has international representatives vetting new additions and ensuring backwards compatibility.

[shakow]

Are those standards really useful though? I'm under the impression that Perl/Ruby/Python/etc. have done well enough without.

[steveklabnik]

Hilariously, Ruby actually has an ISO standard, and it is absolutely useless.

[lifthrasiir]

It has been fast-tracked from the Japanese standard JIS X 3017, and I think there was a strong incentive to standardize due to Ruby being the only current mainstream language originated from Japan. (I recall even the Ruby Association [1] is supported by Matsue, where Matz was born.)

[1] https://www.ruby.or.jp/en/