Digital Mars is a smallAmerican softwarecompany owned byWalter Bright and based inVienna, Virginia. It makesC,C++, andD compilers, and associated utilities such as anintegrated development environment (IDE) forWindows andDOS, which Digital Mars calls an integrated development and debugging environment (IDDE).^[1]

The compilers can be downloaded, free of charge, from Digital Mars's web site.^[2]Product names changed over time. The C compiler was first namedDatalight C compiler, then Zorland C, then Zortech C, then Digital Mars C/C++ compiler. The C++ compiler was first named Zortech C++, thenSymantec C++, then Digital Mars C++ (DMC++).

The company gained notice in the software development community for creating theD programming language. D resulted from Bright's frustration with the direction of the C++ language and from his experience implementing it.^{[citation needed]}Digital Mars is also notable for having shipped the first commercial C++ compiler forWindows^[3]

In 2002, Digital Mars released DMDScript, anECMA-262-compliantJavaScript engine, written in D.^{[citation needed]}

In 1988, Zortech was the first C++ compiler to ship forWindows.PC Magazine ran a graphics benchmark, and reported that most executables produced by Zortech ran faster than executables produced byMicrosoft C 5.1 and byWatcom C 6.5.^[3]Stanley B. Lippman wrote that Zortech was the first C++ compiler to implementreturn value optimization. Later, the C++ standard required this.^[4]

In 2023,Mike Engelhardt released a new simulatorQSPICE, 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.^[5][6]

In a February 1989 overview of optimizing C compilers,BYTE approved of Zortech C 1.07's $90 price, included IDE, andMicrosoft CodeView compatibility. The magazine reported that the software "lacks some of the features of those in the $400 range" but its code often benchmarked better.BYTE concluded that "Zortech does everything that a compiler has to do—at an attractive price".^[7]

• Official website