22 May
2020
22 May
'20
2:28 p.m.
On 22 May 2020, at 03:37, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
<...>
C++ became the language of choice on the PC when MSFT
started pushing
its compiler and Visual Studio IDE.
On the PC side, TurboPascal started to get displaced by Borland C++ I think in the early
90’s. I don’t have a good feeling why, but perhaps it was the parallel evolution of
Microsoft’s C & C++, which were doing pretty well even before 1997 when Visual Studio
began its rise.
Watcom C++ was also around, iirc it was available for OS/2 as well?
On the Unix side, the egcs fork of gcc pushed it forward a lot and the subsequent reverse
takeover of gcc saved it from needing replacement far earlier.
Of course the commercial Unix vendors charging for their compilers helped gcc too, and by
then Pascal, Modula/2/3, Ada ... everything else had become a niche market.
I don’t recall any hard data from back then though, sorry ...
d