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by pjmlp 2878 days ago
> C++ never had a killer app to start its momentum.

C++ was immediately adopted by all major C compiler vendors as it came from AT&T as well.

Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 for MS-DOS was the very last one to adopt C++ on the toolchain.

It was the lingua franca of all major desktop OS GUI frameworks, leaving C just for their lower layers, MS-DOS (Turbo Vision), OS/2 (C/Set++), Windows (OWL, VCL, MFC), Mac OS (PowerPlant, MacApp), BeOS, Symbian.

If you were doing plain C GUI programming you were doing it wrong.

> Neither did Javascript.

JavaScript owns the browser, there is hardly any other alternative regarding "browser systems programming".

> or Java really (or maybe applets, back in the days?).

Java's portability was a gift compared with C compilers still in the middle of migrating from K&R C to ANSI C, C++ compilers which were silos with their GUI frameworks and a standard still a couple of years away to be fully defined.