> If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.

They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.

Several of the lean GUI text editors are built on Scintilla (https://scintilla.org/), which provides a cross-platform editing component that can be integrated in GTK, Windows or Mac GUI apps. Maybe that has too much bells and whistles for you, since it's both about editing and presentation.

> Could turn it around as "everything you can do in C++ you can do in C with a lot less language complexity".

No, you can't, C is lacking a lot that C++ brings to the table. C++ has abstraction capabilities with generic programming and, dare I say it, OO that C has no substitute for. C++ has compile-time computation facilities that C has no substitute for.

The simplest way to have no Korean war is if Kim Il-Sung decides that an invasion is too risky and concentrates on internal matters.

Traditionally it has been done because the last three bits in an object pointer typically are always zero because of alignment, so you could just put a tag there and mask it off (or load it with lea and an offset, especially useful if you have a data structure where you'd use an offset anyway like pairs or vectors). In 64-bit architectures there are two bytes at the top that aren't used (one byte with five-level paging), but they must be masked, since they must be 0x00 or 0xff when used for pointers. In 32-bit archs the high bits were used and unsuitable for tags. All in all, I think the low bits still are the most useful for tags, even if 32-bit is not an important consideration anymore.