Not when compared with Delphi, VB, Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk.

None of these are multi platform or use a widely available high performance language.

Nor was Application Builder? It only ran on UNIX.

Many different unix-like systems, many different architectures, used the C programming language, which is much more widely available than the other listed by pjmlp, and, although it needed some libraries, it is so portable that you can it on modern GNU/linux distros and FreeBSD. You know what the N in GNU means, right?

Oh, and it also ran/runs on VMS.

Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it.

Then Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk are back into the game.

Ah, must be performant as C, then Interface Builder is still into the game.

Just remembered about Visual Age for C++, which I forgot to list, and also fulfils the UNIX and fast as C requirements.

You are hard to argue against :)

I think I should have said "multi platform AND use a widely available high performance language". I don't know if Objective-C can be considered widely available in the 90's. Apple/NeXT implementation AFAIK wasn't contributed to gcc from the beginning and I don't konw if "Interface Builder" was ever run in anything but NeXTSTEP/MacOS.

I really don't know about SmallTalk availability or performance.

> Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it.

:) Well... it excludes VB and Delphi from your list... it would be very good if 90's Microsoft had standardized their OS interface, Sun tried to do that with PWI but was unsuccesful. Also they were x86 only (don't know if VB ran on non x86 NT or CE) while application builder was really architeture independent.

But yes, it looks like you really have a point with Visual Age for C++.