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A comment on Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from. Parent comment

Re:Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it suppos... by tptacek on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:33PM (#10460905)
Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.
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Re:Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it suppos... by saidajigumi on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:44PM (#10460978)
Heck, virtually any C++ compiler was a big pile of sharp edges back then, by comparison to just a few years later. Especially if you dared to use it for embedded work, not so much due to the "embedded" part but just because the embedded suite compilers were just so much further behind the C++ curve.
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Re:Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it suppos... by tptacek on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:48PM (#10461006)
Yep, but the commercial compilers generally had better STLs (particularly for debugging), debuggers that could properly mangle/demangle symbols, and precompiled headers --- in addition to different sets of C++ features that did or didn't work properly.
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Re:Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it suppos... by saidajigumi on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @07:28PM (#10468150)
Largely true, but I recall actually isolating one chunk of code and compiling with g++ just to get halfway sane error messaging around a (IIRC) template-related error. I.e. you could do worse. The primary compiler for that code was the circa-2001 ARM tools suite. I wrote a few novels worth of feedback and bug reporting to them...
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Re:Theranos didn’t work with the huge drug company it suppos... by dalke on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:47PM (#10461400)
And to think I was shipping C++ software compiled during the egcs days. Of course, it compiled on IRIX, AIX, HP-UX and a few other compilers - I think some were still based on cfront - so we were using the boring, simple parts of C++ that everyone supported.
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