> C and C++ also only had proprietary compilers, mostly. I was thinking more in the 90s where GNU already had a freely available C compiler, but GNAT didn't ge

> C and C++ also only had proprietary compilers, mostly. I was thinking more in the 90s where GNU already had a freely available C compiler, but GNAT didn't get a free version until the late 90s, and even then it was built on a fork of gcc you had to download separately until like 2000. It was just a lot of work to get up and running, as opposed to the bundling of C/C++ compilers with Linux that was common, as you say. The initial C compatibility helped C++ a lot too.