[andrewl-hn]

Something that not many people consider. It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing. Without C++ there would be an enormous pressure to add more features to C itself. One reason why C committee could get away without adding much over the years was that they could nod towards C++ and say "that's their job, not ours". And if later didn't exist who knows what kind of language C would become. Classes? Templates? Lambdas? We can only speculate.

[Maxatar]

I don't know if this is true. In the 80s there were many languages that were C with additional features or C preprocessors that added and experimented with features similar to cfront. You had OOPC (object-oriented pre-compiler), Objective-C, C*, Concurrent-C. People were experimenting in all kinds of ways by taking C and trying things out with it.

[CyberDildonics]

I think it is absolutely true, because adding features to an experimental language that has no tools or ecosystem surrounding it does nothing and people know that.

Niche experiments having features doesn't accomplish anything, but adding just one more feature to C seems plausible.

With C++ people could point people to another production ready language compatible with C that people could use, so there was somewhere they could do and an example of the feature working instead of someone promising silver bullets in theory.

[WalterBright]

> adding just one more feature to C seems plausible

I thought it would be a couple months to add C++ to my C compiler. 10 years later...

[WalterBright]

> It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing.

Perhaps. But in the 80's, C was the most practical language to use on the PC, by far. And porting C code to other platforms was easy.

[deaddodo]

Yeah, OPs claim feels disconnected from C’s identity. C stayed conservative because the areas where it excels (to this day) benefit from its “portable assembler” design history. A history with no C++ wouldn’t have changed that, instead another (either non-C extended or alternative C-adapted [Obj-C, for instance]) language would have taken the market C++ did; likely with a larger runway time due to the lack of interoperability/superset compilation.