Welcome to PLDB: a Programming Language Database!

PLDB is a comprehensive database of programming languages and their features. The focus is on programming languages, but the database also includes other languages and entities one degree away--from popular high level plain text formats to binary specifications and beyond.

PLDB is for two groups of people:

Programming language creators. PLDB is organized big data to help you create great new languages, and improve existing ones. When making design decisions, quickly look up what features other languages have tried. Benefit from the experiences of thousands that have built languages before you. If you are researching something and can't find what you need here, you can add it and send a pull request, or share your request on Twitter.
Programming language users. PLDB provides a data-driven view of the programming language universe, to demystify the world of programming languages for you, and provide sound strategic and tactical advice to help you in your projects and your career. If you have a question not answered by the data here, you can add it and send a pull request, or share your request on Twitter.

Join!

Want to get involved? Read more here.

Open source

All data and source code used to generate this site are on GitHub.

Web server

PLDB is an entirely static site. PLDB.io is served via ScrollHub. You can clone the source to PLDB and build it locally and use PLDB entirely offline on your own machine.

Acknowledgements

This site is powered by information and software from so many people and organizations, a few of which are listed on the acknowledgements page.

Cloc Stats

Below are the cloc stats for the pldb repo as of 12/20/2024.

cd ..; cloc --quiet --vcs git . --read-lang-def=code/clocLangs.txt

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.98  T=2.26 s (2294.3 files/s, 93278.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scroll                        5155          30541              0         171379
JavaScript                       9            477            202           2817
Parsers                          5            341              0           2232
JSON                             3              0              0           1952
Explorer                         3             23              0            336
CSS                              2             45             16            261
Markdown                         1             35              0             66
Bourne Shell                     1              1              1             18
Text                             1              0              0             12
SVG                              4              0              0              4
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          5184          31463            219         179077
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mirrors

The URL for the official PLDB site is https://pldb.io. DNS will take that domain name and send your browser an IPv4 address. Your browser will send a request to that address which will reach a DigitalOcean server running ScrollHub. That server will send you the HTML, CSS, Javascript, PNGs, SVGs and JSON that make up the built website.

In case there's a problem with ScrollHub, you should be able to access the exact same site locally by downloading the source.

If ScrollHub AND GitHub were to go down at the same time...well that's why it's good to regularly download the entire source code of the site to your own machine! You can do that with:

git clone https://github.com/breck7/pldb.git
# Then to keep it updated:
cd pldb
git pull

History

Breck Yunits started PLDB as an anonymous Jekyll blog named "CodeLani" from his apartment in Honolulu, Hawai'i, on November 18, 2017.
Breck renamed CodeLani to PLDB and migrated it to Scroll and TrueBase on June 27, 2022.
The new PLDB launched on HackerNews 845 days ago, on August 28, 2022.
Design patterns learned from TrueBase were merged into Scroll and PLDB became a fully functional static site on May 10, 2024

The site owes its existence to a kind (but firm) Internet commenter who told Breck Yunits to "learn to research properly" if he wanted to make his languages any good.

Citation

PLDB content is published to the public domain and you can use it freely. If needed, here are 3 options for citing PLDB:

https://pldb.io

PLDB contributors. (2024) - "PLDB: a Programming Language Database". Retrieved from: 'https://pldb.io' [Online Resource]

@article{pldb,
  author = {PLDB contributors},
  title = {PLDB: a Programming Language Database},
  journal = {PLDB},
  year = {2024},
  note = {https://pldb.io}
 }

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