On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 01:33:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/2/2021 11:48 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Then on the PC and Mac it quickly got the love from Apple (replacing Object Pascal with C++), IBM, Microsoft, Borland, Watcom,  SGI, Sun, HP, among others, and naturally Digital Mars/Symantec as well.
>
> Um, Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler on DOS in 1987. (The existing ones were all cfront based, and were terribly slow.) ZTC++ produced the first boom in use of C++, accounting for perhaps 90% of C++ use.
>
> This popularity lead to Borland dumping their own OOP C and going with C++, which then led to Microsoft getting on the bandwagon.
>
> This popularity then fed back into the Unix systems.
>
> No, you won't find this account in the D&E of C++ histories, but it's what actually happened.

That is my experience as I lived through it during 1980's Portuguese view of the computing world.

For example, I never saw Zortech being sold in any computer shop, while Watcom, Borland and Microsoft compilers were available all over the country. Symantec ones later became available in the mid-90's.

On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 07:32:09 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> That is my experience as I lived through it during 1980's Portuguese view of the computing world.
>
> For example, I never saw Zortech being sold in any computer shop, while Watcom, Borland and Microsoft compilers were available all over the country. Symantec ones later became available in the mid-90's.

That is also my experience. Microsoft, Borland and Watcom were big but I never heard of Zortech. Later on in the 90s I did see the Digital Mars C++ compiler.

On 4/28/2022 9:09 PM, Araq wrote:
> On Friday, 29 April 2022 at 01:33:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Um, Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler on DOS in 1987. (The existing ones were all cfront based, and were terribly slow.)
> 
>  From D&E:
> 
> "The size of this overhead depends critically on the time needed to read and write the intermediate C representation and that primarily depends on the disc read/write strat- egy of a system. Over the years I have measured this overhead on various systems and found it to be between 25% and 100% of the "necessary" parts of a compilation. I have also seen C++ compilers that didn't use intermediate C yet were slower than Cfront plus a C compiler."
> 
> That's not "terribly slow". And before you bring up "templates are slow to compile", in 1987 cfront did not have templates.
> 
> "The earliest implementation of templates that was integrated into a compiler was a version of Cfront that supported class templates (only) written by Sam Haradhvala at Object Design Inc. in 1989."

Zortech C++ was about 4 times faster than cfront based C++ on DOS machines. This was my measurements. I agree it had nothing to do with templates. Personally I doubt Stroustrup had ever tried ZTC++.

I was wrong, ZTC++ came out in 1988, not 1987.


>> ZTC++ produced the first boom in use of C++, accounting for perhaps 90% of C++ use.
>>
>> This popularity lead to Borland dumping their own OOP C and going with C++, which then led to Microsoft getting on the bandwagon.
>>
>> This popularity then fed back into the Unix systems.
>>
>> No, you won't find this account in the D&E of C++ histories, but it's what actually happened.
> 
> Well that's the history as you remember it and Stroustrup does list "1st Zortech C++ release" in June 1988. I cannot say if your "90%" figure is correct or not.

DOS computers were where the great mass of programmers were at the time. 90% is likely conservative. The programming magazines were all focused on DOS programming, the articles about C++ were for DOS C++ programming.

Before ZTC++, the traffic on comp.lang.c++ and comp.lang.objectivec was about the same, and not very much. After ZTC++, the traffic in comp.lang.c++ took off, and comp.lang.objectivec stagnated.

On 4/28/2022 11:11 PM, Araq wrote:
> My intent is to get hard data from Walter.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386323

On 4/29/2022 12:32 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> For example, I never saw Zortech being sold in any computer shop, while Watcom, Borland and Microsoft compilers were available all over the country. Symantec ones later became available in the mid-90's.

ZTC was only sold mail order.