The story
In 1988, Zortech was the first C++ compiler to ship for Windows. PC Magazine ran a graphics benchmark and reported that most executables produced by Zortech ran faster than executables produced by Microsoft C 5.1 and by Watcom C 6.5. Stanley B. Lippman wrote that Zortech was the first C++ compiler to implement return value optimization. Later, the C++ standard required this.
In 2023, Mike Engelhardt released a new simulator QSPICE, which uses this compiler on the backend to allow for C++ and Verilog authored behavioral simulation models to be compiled to native code and loaded by the simulation environment.
From Wikipedia’s article on Digital Mars, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4