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Celebrating 30th Anniversary of the First C++ Compiler: Let's Find Bugs In It

Posted by timothy on from the back-in-time dept.

New submitter Andrey_Karpov writes: Cfront is a C++ compiler which came into existence in 1983 and was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup ("30 YEARS OF C++"). At that time it was known as "C with Classes". Cfront had a complete parser, symbol tables, and built a tree for each class, function, etc. Cfront was based on CPre. Cfront defined the language until circa 1990. Many of the obscure corner cases in C++ are related to the Cfront implementation limitations. The reason is that Cfront performed translation from C++ to C. In short, Cfront is a sacred artifact for a C++ programmer. So I just couldn't help checking such a project [for bugs].

2 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. CFront wasn't a compiler by mveloso · · Score: 4, Informative

    CFront wasn't a compiler, it was a preprocessor that spat out C code that was subsequently compiled by whatever C compiler you happened to have.

    Looking at CFront output was the best way to understand how C++ actually worked at the time, since it was all mapped to pretty straightforward C constructs. I don't think anyone around today knows what a vtable and ptable is, but back then it was how you could tell the programmers who really dug in to the language from those that didn't.

  2. Re:Imagine if it had never been done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Without C++ there would be no Java. Since my community college couldn't afford a new Microsoft site license, I had to learn every flavor of Java for all my programming courses. Meh...

    GCC was free the last time I checked and a free graphical frontend should be possible to find as well. Notepad++ would do (not 100% of license for a college though). Using java instead of C++ for license issues sounds more like an excuse to me, partly because in my university days Microsoft donated licenses to the students and I got free windows and stuff. After all they wanted the new engineering students to be used to microsoft products when they joined the software workforce.

    I learned Java as well, not due to costs, but because the cross platform code made it "the only language you will ever need in the future". Everybody hated it and preferred C or C++ (C was actually surprisingly popular compared to C++) and to this day I haven't had the need to use java even once since I graduated. I use C++ for performance and scripting langauges for whatever uni figured I should use Java for.