Comment by pjmlp
8 hours ago
The original version came with Turbo Pascal 6, the C++ port came later.
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
Amusingly, Free Vision (the Free Pascal version of Turbo Vision) is based on a manual translation of the C++ version because that was released on public domain at some point and someone ported it back from C++ to Object/Free Pascal.
Interesting. If I remember correctly the source code was available (need to check my old disks), however most likely the licence would forbid that anyway.
IIRC Borland released the C++ version specifically as PD later on their FTP server, it isn't based on the version from Turbo C++ physical releases. The history is (very briefly) mentioned in the Free Vision wiki page at the FPC wiki[0] (note that the wiki needs cleanup, e.g. it mentions 64bit clean support as a todo item but FV has been 64bit clean for a very long time now). It also mentions that somewhere between the C++ version and the Pascal conversion, TV/FV was converted to use graphics instead of text mode and it was ported back to text mode -- considering all the conversions, i'm surprised the API remained largely the same so that even now the best way to learn Free Vision is to read Turbo Vision docs/tutorials/books :-P.
[0] https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision
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OWL was really ahead of its time.
Yeah, besides the current offerings from VCL and FireMonkey, only Qt compares to it in terms of existing C++ frameworks.
History rumor hill goes that originally MFC was just as high level, the origin of Afx prefix, however internal teams were opposed to it and hence how MFC became a very thin layer over Win32.
History repeated itself with C++/CX, finally Microsoft had something comparable to C++ Builder, and internal teams weren't happy until they sabotaged the whole effort with C++/WinRT. Now outside Windows team no one cares.
The development experience with OWL, on Windows 3.1 was great, I never bothered with raw Win16 or Win32 other that learning the foundations, or adding support for missing capabilities, at the TP, Delphi, C++ frameworks.