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Reference implementation

In computing, a reference implementation (or, infrequently, sample implementation) is a software example of a standard for use in helping others implement their own versions of the standard. A standard is much easier to understand with a working example to hand.

The reference implementation may or may not be of production quality. The Fraunhofer reference implementation of MP3 is considered of lower encoding quality than many other implementations, such as LAME. However, the X.org reference implementation of the X Window System is not only ready for use, but is increasingly popular on open source Unix-like operating systems as-is. (This is helped by the current version being a fork of the popular XFree86 implementation that X.org then declared to be the reference implementation.)

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