C++: The Documentary

> if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use

What launched C++ into success was Zortech C++. At the time, 90% of programming was done on MS-DOS. Cfront was nearly unusable on DOS, because:

1. agonizingly slow to compile

2. no support for near/far pointers, which was essential for non-trivial apps

Zortech C++ fixed those problems, and sold like wildfire. This provided critical mass for C++ to succeed. The traffic on comp.lang.c++ angled sharply upward. Borland saw our sales, and abandoned their OOP language product and did Turbo C++ instead. Microsoft saw Borland's success and then did their own C++.

We sold a lot of Zortech C++ compilers to Microsoft. They used it to develop COM.

I heard rumors that Microsoft was developing their own OOP C, called C*. I've never been able to confirm it, though.

Little known fact - when I was contemplating enhancing Zortech C into C++, I was concerned about AT&T's intellectual property. I contacted Ryan Williams (I think that was his name), AT&T's IP lawyer. I asked him:

1. do I need a license to create a C++ compiler?

2. do I need to call it something other than C++?

He laughed and said, no, I could do whatever I wanted. He also thanked me for being the only compiler guy to ask permission.

I read about his passing a few years ago. He was a solid guy.

Something that not many people consider. It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing. Without C++ there would be an enormous pressure to add more features to C itself. One reason why C committee could get away without adding much over the years was that they could nod towards C++ and say "that's their job, not ours". And if later didn't exist who knows what kind of language C would become. Classes? Templates? Lambdas? We can only speculate.

Hilarious coming from the guy whose shitty Multics ripoff directly inspired "Worse is Better"

From the essay:

"Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

A further benefit of the worse-is-better philosophy is that the programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience, and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use. Programs written using the New Jersey approach will work well both in small machines and large ones, and the code will be portable because it is written on top of a virus.

It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.

The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."

https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

I highly respect the Ken Thompson and the rest of the old UNIX hands, but wouldn't they admit that the real world is messy and the best solutions in isolation don't always win?

Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.

It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.

Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.

But C++98 is so different to even C++11. Bjarne's book covering C++11 read completely differently to the 98 version, I found.

> IMO, if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use

Obviously. C++ was a "better C" in that you could keep a lot of your "legacy" C code while improving your codebase piecemeal with C++ features. Your management didn't even have to care, in that C/C++ was accepted as a valid descriptor even by people who should have known better. It's a wonder Java/C# and Perl/PHP never caught on.

> kiss goodbye to any notion of being able comprehend existing code that's not written by you (until llms arrived).

In my experience it takes a while (<=3 months) for folks to become proficient when they see an alien dialect of c++. That may sound totally unacceptable to you (fair). Cpp is also a “big tent” language in that it is genuinely multi-paradigm.

I think LLM’s might help, but sometime they hurt too (confidently/persuasively wrong analyses). The gain is large for small/trivial contributions. For changes that require genuine understanding, I’m not sure (large error bars personally as to whether the sign is even positive).

UNIX founders never liked C++ that much, note how Plan 9 and Inferno only have C as the systems language, with the Alef experiment, and later Limbo.

Followed a couple of years later contribution to Go's design, exactly to avoid C++ at Google.

The last one from Scott Meyers was the final nail in the coffin for me. The chapter about auto and template parameter deduction specifically. Since then, I've been happy with Golang and Java.

I have read as much as I can on the history of C++ and I'm looking forward to watch this. I find the process of it's evolution deeply fascinating.

Wow is this just a shitpost (it was funny!) or do your builds actually take about an hour? That's nuts, if so.