Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D.

[9] Bright wrote Mattel Intellivision games while at Caltech, then worked as a mechanical engineer after graduation.

After learning C in the early 1980s he ported Empire to the IBM PC, stating that C "might as well have been called EIL, for 'Empire Implementation Language.

[12] Walter regularly writes scientific and magazine articles about compilers and programming[13] and was a blogger for Dr. Dobb's Journal.

[14] Around 2014, Bright wrote Warp, a fast C/C++ preprocessor written in D, for Facebook.