What are CAD applications (Rhino, Autocad) of today written in and how are they organized internally ?

I gave as an example, Autocad and Rhino, although I would love to hear of other examples as well. I'm particularly interested in knowing what is their backend written in (multilanguage ?) and how is it organized, and how do they handle their frontend (GUI) in real time ? Do they use native windows API's or some libraries of their own, since I imagine, as good as may be, the open source solutions on today's market won't cut it. I may be wrong ...

As most of you who have used them know, they handle amongs other things relatively complex rotational operations in realtime (shading is not interesting me). I've been doing some experiments with several packages recently, and for some larger models found that there is considerable difference in speed in, for example, programed rotation (big full ship models) amongst some of them (which I won't name). So I'm wondering about their internals ...

Also, if someone knows of some book on the subject, I'd be interested to hear of it.