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Bjarne took the wonderful thing that was C and made C++. Rob is not a fan of C++: he thinks the language evolved badly and added poor concepts from the beginning (IIRC iostreams and templates were two of the concepts), and it embedded a number of design decisions that led to extremely slow compiles and links (like, 45 minutes to link a Google binary). Ian Taylor even wrote a better linker (gold) for Google to deal with that.

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Compare the designs of iostreams (Stroustrup) and the STL (Stepanov), conclusions left as an exercise for the reader.

when I discovered STLport around 2001, it was a real revelation and very convenient because I was finally able to compile the code my coworkers wrote on "real UNIX" with "real C++ compilers" (lol cfront) In researching my answer I came across http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html# "putting it simply, STL is the result of a bacterial infection."

thank you for that link. what a diamond of interesting stuff!

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