[vox-tech] libstdc++ and sgi and hp?

[Ken Bloom]

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 19:51 -0700, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> Hai Yi wrote:
> > I've been reading some general stuff about C++, it appears to me that
> > in unix/linux, libstdc++ is a c++ implementation from gnu, but there
> > are the sgi and hp's copyright info in the header files like
> > /usr/include/c++/4.3/vector . I used to use sgi's stl website as
> > reference (http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/ ), which gave me an impression
> > that this company used to be a big contributor to C++ (or STL? )
> > standardization; however, from wiki, it appears HP is the one behind
> > the STL effort.
> > 
> > Anyone can have a brief history lesson about libstdc++, sgl and hp's
> > relations in regard to STL?
> 
> Alexander Stepanov might [1][2] have something to say about the latter
> two, but I don't think he reads this mailing list.
> 
> [1] http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/drdobbs-interview.html
> [2] http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html
> 

Sounds from these articles and Wikipedia like:

Alexander Stepanov is the contributor, and whatever company employs him
at the time is the one behind the the STL effort. So the earliest
conceptual work in generic programming was stuff Stepanov did at GE and
later AT&T. Stepanov must have started working with generic programming
in C++ when he was at HP (and he published a full STL while he was
there). He then did further development on the STL at SGI, and that's
the version that's standardized.

There are other languages these days that also seem to do a good job at
generic programming, in particular Haskell, and dynamic languages like
Ruby.

--Ken