MSVC
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“I chose VC++ on purpose, because it is what I know better”
“Portable toolchain install for MSVC + WinSDK took about 30 seconds to download. Very easy.”
Show 3 more
“MSVC's support for musttail is hot off the press”
“MSVC will optimize this into a constant 5”
“they trust MSVC to do the right thing”
Caveats and dissent
“not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently”
“They officially saw no need for C support going forward.”
Show 2 more
“MSVC is quite a bad benchmark as far as C (not C++) standards conformance goes”
“it looks like MSVC development has stalled again.”
Often compared with
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“It has been doing lto (aka ltcg) for a very long time at reasonably good throughput.”
Threads where it came up
- You can't fool the optimizer 5 mentions
- Python 3.15's interpreter for Windows should be 15% faster 2 mentions
- C++26 Contracts: Introduction to Preconditions and Postconditions 1 mention
- 11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker 1 mention
- Communication Between the Compiler, the Build System, and Beyond 1 mention
- Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft 1 mention
Data: msvc.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 35
“MSVC and clang-tidy have struggled to achieve the Core Guidelines ideas for lifetimes”
“The long-entrenched MSVC compiler is still a major player despite that”
“debug heap that MSCV was already having in 2000”
“The Right Path Forward would be for MSVC, GCC, and Clang all to try implementing P2025's algorithm in their front ends.”
“not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently”
“They officially saw no need for C support going forward.”
“Windows and Linux, msvc/gcc/clang/clangcl”
“I chose VC++ on purpose, because it is what I know better”
“minus some bugs or code completion misbehaving (but bearable)”
“MSVC can do this for x86”
“MSVC is quite a bad benchmark as far as C (not C++) standards conformance goes”
“Use the new standards-conformant preprocessor with `/Zc:preprocessor`”
“it looks like MSVC development has stalled again.”
“Portable toolchain install for MSVC + WinSDK took about 30 seconds to download. Very easy.”
“Windows and Linux, msvc/gcc/clang/clangcl.”
“GCC and MSVC are pretty close.”
“a windows client compiled with MSVC in windows”
“MSVC has a strict separation between the C++ and C frontend”
“It works for gcc/clang/msvc with -O0, -O1, -O2, and even -O3”
“If Microsoft made a better, free of charge C compiler in early 2000s”
“it absolutely had bugs”
“The actual blocker for named modules is not MSVC”
“MSVC's support for musttail is hot off the press”
“MSVC can actually convert switch-case interpreters to threaded code automatically if some conditions are met”
“better than MSVC actually”
“that's an MSVC problem”
“Turn up the optimiser to `/O2` and MSVC returns 5 directly, too.”
“MSVC will optimize this into a constant 5”
“the case of it not optimizing was MSVC targetting Windows”
“I see the msvc arm compiler has not improved much in 20 years.”
“The MSVC linker has a feature where it will merge byte-for-byte identical functions.”
“make use of a non-standard MSVC feature”
“I wouldn't bet waiting that it will ever happen”
“they trust MSVC to do the right thing”
“It seems that MSVC doesn't like those macros, though.”