Reference implementation

As a reference implementation software is called in computer science, which is a standard or de facto standard implemented and considered as a reference for all other implementations of the same standard. Often the reference implementation is provided by the creators of the standard. A reference implementation is therefore characterized by a high standard of conformity. Another important function of a reference implementation is that the standard creators can check their theoretical ideas in practice, which in turn leads to higher quality and consistency of standards.

Reference implementations should implement primarily the features described in the relevant standard as precise as possible. The serviceability usually plays only a subordinate role. Since they were not developed for use in practice, have reference implementations over comparable software usually on a restricted set of functions and have a poorer performance, which may manifest itself in a slow processing speed, disproportionately high memory requirements and crashes.

Examples

• The web browser Amaya has been developed since 1996 by the World Wide Web Consortium and used to investigate web standards on its practicability, even before they are implemented by other browsers.
• The file format 7z and the compression program 7 -Zip, which allows to generate archive files in this format, are reference implementations developed by the same author since 1998 free Lempel -Ziv - Markov algorithm.