Actually, C was a lot worse. For the first 9 years C was basically whatever AT&T wanted. In 78 K&R published The C Programming Language, creating a specification. In the next decade C was very much tied to Unix and non-Unix usages often had some oddities and interoperability issues. The last 3 decades have been good though.

You know... there's a difference between "(...) with people on ARM, Google, Apple, Blommberg, Sony, IBM, Microsoft's payroll?" and "people on Google payroll". In one case you have many companies cooperating, in the other - just one company.

Looking into the past can have some predictive value, but looking that far back and at a different company is of very limited value.

If one evaluates C# they should obviously look at what MS are doing. Same thing for Swift and Apple.

I think what <pjmlp> is saying is that (1) these languages are too widely adopted to fail -- somebody is bound to take the ball and continue dribbling it even if the worst happens (company abandons language) and (2) to have a widely adopted language means you have to be a member of a number of committees -- because without standards you wouldn't become a widely adopted language in the first place.

In short, we're quite safe in terms of if C#, Swift and Go will live on. They will.

The issue with C# and Swift is that the Apple and MS dev communities enjoy having a ready made solution that they can pick up and work with immediately. Official support is very important.

C# and to some extent Swift are also two huge platforms, there are very few organisations out there that would be able to steer their development.

Finally, they are not standardised in any way. MS tried something with 2.0 and then gave up.

My impression is that these two live and die by the will of their corporate masters. I'm not saying they will kill them or anything, that would be pretty stupid of them to do.

> Finally, they are not standardised in any way. MS tried something with 2.0 and then gave up.

They are standardized, you just need to look at the right place.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/referen...

http://fsharp.org/specs/language-spec/

https://swift.org/documentation/

Documentation & specs is not standardisation, not in the C or C++ sense. But you already know that, so why are we having this conversation?

I assume you know what a de facto standard is all about.

If Google, Apple or Microsoft take their employees out of ANSI or from GCC/LLVM contributions, I can assure you they won't move much beyond the current state.

What are the odds that all big players would remove support for something that their platforms are built on? At the same time?

C++ is one of the healthiest languages in existance. It hits all the important checkboxes of standardisation, wide industry and platform support and large community.

I imagine you never lived through the days when each C++ compiler had a different understanding what it meant to compile C++ code.

It is just like trying to compile the Linux kernel with clang instead of gcc, with the source code full of gcc extensions.