[TUHS] History of popularity of C

[David Arnold]

On 22 May 2020, at 03:37, arnold at 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