Comment by flohofwoe
14 hours ago
I don't agree. UNIX was an extremely niche operating system until Linux won the data center, at that time both C and C++ were already extremely popular outside the UNIX world. C won because it was so easy to adapt to new hardware architectures (even GPU shading languages are just minimally extended flavours of C and C++).
> UNIX was an extremely niche operating system until Linux won the data center
UNIX was ubiquitous in the data center well before Linus even posted his first version of Linux on USENET.
Everything ran on SunOS, HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, etc.
Most people only cared about C, because they needed to work on UNIX, and UNIX was taking over the server room and all 1980's graphical workstations.
C was pretty much ignored on 8 bit home computers, outside some toy compilers for CP/M.
In the 16 bit days, it was yet another language alongside BASIC compilers, Pascal, Modula-2, Assembly.
C is so tied to UNIX, that POSIX had to be created so that any non-UNIX operating system could provide a cozy home for their C compilers.
UNIX/POSIX is for all practical purposes the runtime most C applications rely on, there are naturally some exceptions like free-standing or Windows (which eventually gave up and add to start improving its support).
It is only due to historical accident that Microsoft gave up on Xenix, instead of replacing their MS-DOS efforts.
I don't know about you but I need zero POSIX to write C on Windows. Not even much of the (mostly bad) C standard library. I use snprintf for convenience (but I don't have to), and memcpy, that's about it.
And many projects properly abstract their OS layer so they aren't tied to POSIX.
Maybe Unix is tied to C, but C isn't tied to Unix.
> UNIX was an extremely niche operating system until Linux won the data center
?!? What a claim!
Sorry, what? Most of data centers were running a UNIX operating system back in the day. What operating system do you think they were running?
There is a weird moment toward the end of the 1990s when Microsoft is trying to show their NT is a serious competitor in this space.
Traditionally this was a profitable niche, Microsoft would like to take a fat piece of that, and instead what happened is that Linux destroyed the profit margin. A million dollars overhead that would have kept a hungry UNIX® vendor alive on your project didn't turn into an extra million dollars on Microsoft's balance sheet, instead it evaporated because Linux is "free". And so then Microsoft lost interest.
Yeah, and one of the ways to show it was a serious OS for DoD projects was to have a POSIX subsystem, which had they kept it around, Linux would never have taken off on the PC, and there would be no need for WSL 40 years later.
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WindowsNT was the other operating system of that time.
That's way way later. UNIXes were the ones running in 70s and 80s. WindowsNT and Linux only later came to take a slice and, still later on, Linux won the day. How anyone would consider UNIX "niche" is beyond me.
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With Win32, OS/2 and POSIX subsystems.
Disclaimer: This is just some cursory research using LLMs.
C was invented to rewrite UNIX in a programming language that made it easy to port UNIX between machines.
So what you're saying is contradictory. You're saying the underlying motivation of C was wrong or unnecessary (porting UNIX to different hardware architectures) but C won because that underlying motivation (easy porting between hardware architectures) was partially right.
Your position is now that C didn't need UNIX as a stopgap, which is weird because your argument gains no weight (basically saying C's dominance is sheer coincidence) if it's true but if it's false you're just plain wrong.
My point is that C's popularity quickly outgrew the popularity of UNIX, especially during most of the 1990s before Linux made UNIX accessible to us "PC peasants". Most 1990s PC games were written in C, and C was also the dominant high level language on 16/32 bitters like the Amiga or Atari ST.
Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.
On the consoles it took until PlayStation for C to take off among game devs.
Additionally many Amiga games used Blitz BASIC and AMOS.
Anyone involved in the Demoscene early days would be 100% Assembly as well.
On PC, it required until Watcom with its great MS-DOS extender for devs to finally move away from Assembly in mass.
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