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

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 5, 2015 @04:01AM 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].

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CFront wasn't a compiler by mveloso · 2015-11-05 05:09 · 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.