It's not blaming someone else. Bjarne worked at AT&T Bell Labs, and once C++ caught management's eye and became more than his own personal project, 100% compati

It's not blaming someone else. Bjarne worked at AT&T Bell Labs, and once C++ caught management's eye and became more than his own personal project, 100% compatibility with C++ was a business requirement. Bjarne ended down expanding a huge effort to bring that down to about 99% compatibility, to avoid some of C's most insidious warts such as prototype-less functions, but compatibility was still a goal. That goal included semantic compatibility (C++ constructs shouldn't feel alien to C) and performance equivalence (C++ abstractions should have the same performance cost as C). That's why Objective C's good(?) design of strapping Smalltalk's syntax and semantics to C inside square brackets was never an option. Objective C containers not supporting C primitives would have never made it. And let's not forget that Objective C uses dynamic dispatch and must box primitive types, so it could never claim to be on par with C performance-wise.