Maybe for younger generations.
Apple and Microsoft systems have been supporting this on their native toolchains since the mid-90's.
Apple and Microsoft systems have been supporting this on their native toolchains since the mid-90's.
I think what is new is that in the mid 90s you didn't have an open source, memory safe, ergonomic, strongly typed, type inferenced language that targets multiple platforms with ease, with a decent standard lib. Rust is delivering that. Golang is delivering that. I think those two are novel in that sense.
From where I'm sitting the last few decades have been ruled by VMs and the explosion of scripting languages, because no one wanted to use those Apple/Microsoft toolchains that have been around in the 90s. While those toolchains rested on their laurels (or didn't, can't tell the difference now), Java became the enterprise workhorse.
Many devs do actually enjoy those Apple/Microsoft toolchains.
Java was marketed pretty closely to that.
Make you can use qmake as a prebuild step and include the generated moc files in your build? I wonder how many qt headers are in the generated source files.