don't get me wrong, it's a fun rabbit hole. ive enjoyed it, i think ive gained a lot of reverence for these languages that get spoken of in such a negative light in modern times where "rust everything" is everywhere you look. i chuckle now when i see someone write about how musl had some massive performance problems, because as it turns out glibc wasnt some monolithic old piece of crap it has literally decades of heavy thought/brains/performance optimization that went into it & operating without the knowledge of where this came from = people are reinventing the same problems that have already been solved. im probably learning c/cpp completely wrong working my way up from like 2002 projects so im stuck in c98 standard and every once and then when i hope forward to compile a modern c/cpp project i have a weird appreciation for some of the modernities. but also a weird reverence for the straight forwardness of old stuff. i actually, surprisingly, dont like cmake. i dont know what to make of that, im probably not cut out to be a c/cpp developer because of that but i dunno i kinda prefer cruising through old makefiles and seeing how everything was treed together.

with that, very cool collection of history here. hard to talk about the histories without talking about the attempt at commercialization/capture of compilers and the languages though. intel and microsoft sure tried their damndest. intel doing the cpu proc info not matching intel = no optimizations for you buddy is possibly still in play today. i cant imagine any scenarios where id want to use an intel compiler the experience of getting icc/fortran installed makes me want to punch my face. but it is interesting peeking at the old compilers, icc 5 and its old documentation back in the days when the website looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20030130050650/http://intel.com/ i have a copy of the compiler and its interesting to tinker with.