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Comment by jibsen | Hacker News Reader

You might like Clang with Microsoft CodeGen[1], a work in progress by Microsoft to add a Clang toolset to Visual Studio 2015 that uses the MSVC backend.

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-wit...

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Yeah I have been following the Clang\C2 work. I guess that is what the LLVM project would rather work with Microsoft towards rather than rolling their own. It will certainly make life easier for cross-platform C++ to use Clang/C2 over C1/C2. Having to install Visual Studio to get it is a bit annoying though, I would prefer to fire up a VM with just Clang and the MSVC/Windows headers to command line compile. Visual Studio is a big install inside a VM which is annoying.

I quick question you may know the answer to, does the Windows SDK not come with the Windows C++ headers anymore? I installed the Windows 10 1511 SDK the other day but even a full install didn't give me any of the stdlib which I thought it would do? I understand they removed the compilers but I thought the headers still came with it?

Oh, bummer, I even thought the Windows SDK still had the command-line compilers. What's it good for then?

Most open-source projects don't even bother supporting MSVC, and I don't blame them one bit. MinGW-w64 gives a significantly less painful route to Windows support, and allows you to pretend MSVC doesn't exist in a lot of cases.

I am trying to work out what use the Windows SDK is without Visual Studio (which also includes the Windows SDK!).

What benefit does that really have over just using Clang with LLVM codegen though?

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