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, open an issue and explain what you need.
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, open an issue and explain what you need.

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

Information about our servers is available here.

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 06/29/2023.

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

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.90  T=1.71 s (3043.3 files/s, 106155.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLDB                          4842          23407              0         148874
Scroll                          75            630              0           2739
Grammar                        256             50              0           2010
JavaScript                       4            384             54           1879
JSON                             3              0              0            698
Explorer                         3             23              0            336
YAML                             4              4              4             68
Bourne Shell                     3              4              5             38
SVG                              4              0              0              4
CSS                              1              0              0              1
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          5195          24502             63         156647
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mirrors

The URL for the official PLDB site is https://pldb.com. 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 our virtual server running Node.js (nicknamed Marconi) running in a Digital Ocean datacenter. Marconi_ will send you the HTML, CSS, Javascript, PNGs, SVGs and JSON that make up the built website.

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

If Marconi 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

PLDB.com came online 318 days ago. PLDB.com launched 305 days ago. PLDB began as an anonymous Jekyll blog on November 18, 2017. The blog was migrated to Scroll and the name changed from CodeLani to PLDB on June 27, 2022.

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.com

PLDB contributors. (2022) - "PLDB: a Programming Language Database". Retrieved from: 'https://pldb.com' [Online Resource]

@article{pldb,
  author = {PLDB contributors},
  title = {PLDB: a Programming Language Database},
  journal = {PLDB},
  year = {2022},
  note = {https://pldb.com}
 }

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