Hacker News Reader

i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere.

The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.

View on HN

Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler

I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies

A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly

damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com