C++ compilers shipped their own collections, for Borland compilers it was BIDS.
The first version used preprocessor macro tricks for generatic code, basically what Go folks re-discovered with //go:generate, we already had it in 1992.
BIDS 2.0 already used templates.
It was exactly because even C++ for MS-DOS provided safer library than C, that I was never that into C. It wasn't better than TP in features and safety, only in portability, and that I could get from C++ anyway.
