[groovy2shoes]

Yep. The way I remember it is that until MSVC 6, everyone was still using Borland or Watcom tools. Even up until the early 2000s, Borland C++ Builder was giving MSVC a run for the money. There was also a plethora of quality but smaller-marketshare tools like the Digital Mars stuff.

The real reasons C++ "beat" Obj-C have more to do with a) AT&T aggressively marketing C++ for at least 6 years before NeXT showed up on the scene, b) C++ being a little older then Obj-C in the first place, and c) Obj-C offering all the expressiveness of C with all the efficiency of Smalltalk (thank you, James Iry).

[pjmlp]

Also other things that came to mind, CORBA on UNIX, Apple's move from Object Pascal to C++, and the whole Taligent project that ended up nowhere.