GNU developed the catalysts which others use

Other people's accounts seem less optimistic about the other compilers that existed at the time. (RMS, Michael Tiemann, and others whose names I forget or don't know) I'll review those statements more critically next time.

Maybe those tools happened to work ok for your usage, but weren't good enough for larger/different projects? GNU was written in C, so it doesn't seem like the C++ frontend could be what made GCC important.

> Somebody would have, too, if

In all fairness, compiler development is littered with corpses of statements like this :-)

I think the fact that the GNU project actually did it, is what makes GNU special.