Subject

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Thu Aug 8 21:03:44 UTC 2019


On 8/8/2019 3:29 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-08-07 at 17:16 -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
>>
>> Before ZTC++, C++ was a curiosity on unix platforms that was battling
>> neck-and-neck with Objective C. (The comp.lang.c++ and comp.lang.objectivec
>> newsgroups had about the same traffic volume.) After ZTC++ appeared, C++
>> boomed
>> and ObjC tanked (and was rescued from oblivion by Apple).
> 
> Being in the UNIX (well Solaris) world at the time at UCL, C++ was seen as
> interesting but in need of templates which it then got (1990) and so became
> viable, and Objective C was seen (possibly wrongly but still) as ramming
> Smalltalk and C together badly and so not viable. Someone got a few NeXT
> machines but they got put in a cupboard to gather dust: nice UI paradigm,
> useless programming platform. Macintosh had already taken hold in the HCI and
> media communities.
> 
> I was teaching C++ to first year second term (first term they did Scheme (1987
> and 1988) or Miranda (1989 onwards) undergraduates 1987 to 1992 – all dates
> ±1. We used the Glockespiel compiler because CFront was an afront, and GCC was
> not up to it. Students liked it and did very well. After 1990 anyway when we
> didn't have to do #define/void* hacks to create data structures but could use
> templates.
> 
> Of course templates with untyped parameters was an error, still not fixed in
> C++20 – apparently Concepts got pulled out again.

Templates were a very big deal for templates, but being in the trenches it was 
clear that C++ was a winner even without them.

The difference Zortech C++ made was:

1. it was cheap
2. it was fast
2. it was on DOS where 90% of the programming action was
3. it was adapted to the DOS near/far memory models

cfront simply fell flat on all 4 points, and only saw use on DOS with Microsoft 
only shops. Even Microsoft used ZTC++ internally (COM is Zortech's memory model 
<g>).



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