Which language will we use? C++ was the obvious choice as a tradeoff between stability, standardization, and efficiency. Java was considered... Good experiences developing and porting Tk/Tcl. Avoid a reliance on Perl. Remember Lisp?

Strategy: EGCS: finally a convergence on versions of GNU's gcc, and the necessary enhancements to conform to the ANSI C++ standard. CYGWIN: Provide a common "Unix" environment across all platforms.