<story><title>Rejuvenating the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/09/25/rejuvenating-the-microsoft-c-c-compiler.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exDM69</author><text>This is &lt;i&gt;excellent&lt;/i&gt; news. MSVC is a big pain in the ass for me, as I tend to write C code (not ++ usually) and Microsoft&amp;#x27;s C compiler is the one with the worst support for language level features (out of widely used compilers). E.g. having to move variables to beginning of block (c89 style) is just miserable. A popular option is to compile C code as C++ inside an &amp;quot;extern C&amp;quot; block to stop name mangling, but this isn&amp;#x27;t too clean either.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d also like to have compatibility of some language extension features, such as built-in functions and attributes. In particular, CPU-agnostic intrinsics for common instructions like atomics, popcount or count leading zeros as well SIMD arithmetic would be great.&lt;p&gt;My favorite C language extension is SIMD vector arithmetic with infix operators. You can get really pretty and portable (!) vector math code written in Clang and GCC using vector extensions, but again, it&amp;#x27;s not available in MSVC.&lt;p&gt;For most of my current projects, I have no intent of supporting the (current) Microsoft C compiler. It&amp;#x27;s not worth the effort.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rejuvenating the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/09/25/rejuvenating-the-microsoft-c-c-compiler.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simfoo</author><text>I hope Microsoft never decides to ditch their compiler and use something existing like Clang. I may have had headaches due to Microsoft incompatibilities before, but having a real alternative (or even three, MinGW still works fine) is great.&lt;p&gt;That said I applaud their decision to fix their compiler architecture problems!</text></comment>