I worked at a multi-platform UNIX software vendor back then, and did the project of compiling our products to ANDF. At one point I counted 20 distinct UNIX variants that we had in our office (all workstations).
It was believed that UNIX systems complied with government procurement standards (eg this is where POSIX is relevant), but there were always bugs and differences in behaviour. In C code this is handled by #if pre-processor directives to adapt as needed. ANDF required turning that into runtime if statements instead. (An example would be if there were two different network interface calls depending on platform.) That would have been a herculean task and was in same places impossible such as the same API taking different numbers of parameters on different platforms. The ANDF compiler would have to pick one for its header files.
Even something like endianess is usually handled by #if and not an if statement, so you can see just how much effort would be needed just to have it compile. You still had to do all the multi-platform installation instructions and testing, so no one had an incentive to make things more complicated.
Java killed ANDF stone dead. While Java was most prominent for applets in the browser, it also competed with C++ on the backend. C++ compilers cost a lot of money, had licensing daemons that locked you to one platform, and implemented different subsets of the C++ standard and library. Java was more forgiving and the JVM provided standard features like multi-threading and networking. You will also note that Sun spent a lot of effort to keep Java standard.
I worked at a multi-platform UNIX software vendor back then, and did the project of compiling our products to ANDF. At one point I counted 20 distinct UNIX variants that we had in our office (all workstations).
It was believed that UNIX systems complied with government procurement standards (eg this is where POSIX is relevant), but there were always bugs and differences in behaviour. In C code this is handled by #if pre-processor directives to adapt as needed. ANDF required turning that into runtime if statements instead. (An example would be if there were two different network interface calls depending on platform.) That would have been a herculean task and was in same places impossible such as the same API taking different numbers of parameters on different platforms. The ANDF compiler would have to pick one for its header files.
Even something like endianess is usually handled by #if and not an if statement, so you can see just how much effort would be needed just to have it compile. You still had to do all the multi-platform installation instructions and testing, so no one had an incentive to make things more complicated.
Java killed ANDF stone dead. While Java was most prominent for applets in the browser, it also competed with C++ on the backend. C++ compilers cost a lot of money, had licensing daemons that locked you to one platform, and implemented different subsets of the C++ standard and library. Java was more forgiving and the JVM provided standard features like multi-threading and networking. You will also note that Sun spent a lot of effort to keep Java standard.