[tialaramex]

> I remember the C++ ca. 1994 year when I started my career. It was C with Objects back then

It is possible, and perhaps even likely that the C++ you wrote in 1994 was indeed this "better C" and maybe even the C++ you read, the language Stroustrup wrote about in 1985 although "C with Objects" is much older still. The ISO document (C++ 98 aka ISO 14882:1998) was four years into your future in 1994, but the committee to write that document had existed for quite some time. Stroustrup's 1991 Second Edition of his appropriately already big book "The C++ Programming Language" explains that the committee have accepted Templates, although I believe at that point they didn't realise they'd inadvertently thus added an entirely new meta-language which is programmed differently than the rest of C++

Boost comes much later, it's only about as old as the actual ISO document.

[thriftwy]

I believe that not many developers really wanted C++ and craved Object Pascal instead.

I don't like Pascal but I have to admit that Object Pascal is a succint and successful addition of OO to a manually memalloc language, whereas C++ is neither.

[pjmlp]

As someone that went from Turbo Pascal to C++, while enjoying Borland's ecosystem, the reasoning was clear.

A programming language that at a time offered similar security and features, with much better portability.

Never was a big C fan, with Object Pascal and C++ on my toolbox.

[pjmlp]

Turbo C++ for Windows 3.1, released in 1993, already had support for templates in its initial design form.

Borland C++ 2.0, or 3.0, rewrote BIDS from preprocessor magic into templates.

CSet++ for OS/2, also early 1990s also offered template based collections.

By 1996, MFC introduced template based collection classes as well.

[limaoscarjuliet]

I started with Stroustrup's C++, it already had templates back then.