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Comment by general_ai | Hacker News Reader

Of these I used all but Zortech. None of them compare to GCC6. I've also used Microsoft C++ compiler fairly recently. It's not even close. I don't use Xcode when coding C++ on OS X, vim + YouCompleteMe beats the heck of any IDE I have ever used. I prefer Linux "perf" to Instruments, too. It's not an option on the Mac, but if it was, that's what I'd be using.

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How do you do these tasks with GCC 6?

- graphical debugging of parallel tasks and threads

- displaying data structures graphically with code navigation

- WYSIWYG UIs with tooling like Blend

- GPU debugging

- Code navigation across object files, shared libraries and source code

- Incremental compilation and linking with intermediate representations stored in a database.

- Out of the box representation for all STL data structures and user defined types

Tooling is much more than just a plain old compiler.

That's the first time I've seen a VS user praise MSBuild, which is utter garbage. On the unix side you won't hear much praise for GDB or LLDB, but for everything you've listed numerous tools exist. Eclipse in particular has superior code indexing/navigation capabilities. Both QT and GTK have GUI builders. NVidia provides a plugin to debug and profile GPU code.

What Microsoft compiler doesn't provide in my experience is decent codegen.

> Eclipse in particular has superior code indexing/navigation capabilities.

Not when compared with the enterprise and ultimate versions. Or with the changes done in VS 2015, improved in the upcoming VS 2017 for incremental building and database storage of symbols.

> Both QT and GTK have GUI builders.

Miles behind of what Blend + XAML allow for.

> NVidia provides a plugin to debug and profile GPU code.

How well does it work with Intel and AMD cards?

> What Microsoft compiler doesn't provide in my experience is decent codegen.

On Windows, among commercial compilers, only ICC generates better code.

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