In fact, it was welcomed in open arms even being originally interpreted, because writing portable C or C++ code in 1996 was still a mess, even across UNIX flavours.
On my university no one got Sun's marketing money in 1998, yet the distributed systems, compilers design, and graphics programming, all adopted Java as the language for new teaching materials, as it sorted out several problem with the assignments.
OWL was quite good and one of my favourite C++ frameworks, but not something that was being used at my university on assignments that were mostly done on UNIX, which was my point.
On my university no one got Sun's marketing money in 1998, yet the distributed systems, compilers design, and graphics programming, all adopted Java as the language for new teaching materials, as it sorted out several problem with the assignments.