If you know of other early C++ libraries, please contact Paul McJones (paul at mcjones dot org).

Chronology

1986

Pi debugger - Cargill

Applications

Pi

Pi is a debugger written in C ++. This paper explains how object-oriented programming in C + + has influenced Pi's evolution. The motivation for object-oriented programming was to experiment with a browser-like graphical user interface. The first unforeseen benefit was in the symbol table: lazy construction of an abstract syntax-based tree gave a clean interface to the remainder of Pi, with an efficient and robust implementation. Next, though not in the original design, Pi was easily modified to control multiple processes simultaneously. Finally, Pi was extended to control processes executing across multiple heterogeneous target processors. [Cargill, OOPSPLA 1986]

Source code

• Version for Blit terminal, with libj and pads libraries, supplied by Noel Hunt. Compressed tar archive
• Version from the AT&T CD-ROM on which Cfront 3.0.3 was distributed, in directory /C++ Tools/source_cd/pi. Compressed tar archive

Papers

• T.A. Cargill. The Feel of Pi. Proceedings Winter USENIX Meeting, Denver, January 1986, pages 62-71. PDF at bitsavers.org
• Thomas A. Cargill. Pi: A Case Study in Object-Oriented Programming. OOPSLA 1986, pages 350-360. ACM Digital Library