&gt; The original Cfront compiler actually supported it (admittedly, it was very buggy). The problem with export was that, at the time of discussion (~1996), no one really understood just what the impact of all of the template complexity<p>Actually I think they kind of did, as Ada already had generics and modules in 1983. And STL was born on Ada.<p>However, Ada compilers were once upon a time believed to be complexer to implement than C++ ones and had beefy hardware requirements, so maybe they didn&#x27;t want to try that route.<p>Now they are trying to finally add modules. :)