Official Visual Studio Support for MinGW, Cygwin, and MSYS2 | Hacker News Reader

Official Visual Studio Support for MinGW, Cygwin, and MSYS2

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

68 pointsbauta-steen12 comments

I recently started a project with MinGW just to avoid using Visual Studio. I have a fairly beefy machine, but VS still takes forever to load.

So far from my experience if you use C/C++ project you can:

1. Either use Mingw-W64, which is "closer" to WinAPI for compilation for Windows platforms, also more actively developed

2. Use the better build system. So far, I think Meson (+ Ninja to actually build) is very easy and fast even for the complex projects. Moreover it works great on both *nix and Windows systems - it can generate VS Projects, if you need (but I recommend Ninja still - it's so much faster), and you can use not the full Visual Studio installation, but just a Visual C++ Build Tools, with compilers only.

Thanks! I'll have to look into those. I'm just using GNU make at the moment.

They should just switch to Clang completely. MSVC is well known for lagging behind modern C and C++ compilers. Sadly their slowness on supporting standards created a huge population of C and C++ programmers who do not even know about existence of some very useful features. Luckily recently they started to improve the situation, but damage is already done, and with their reputation I don't believe they will be on par with Clang or GCC ever.

There are quite a few commercial compilers behind MSVC++.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support

Not everyone is stuck only with the big three.

MSVC is roughly as quick as GCC to adopt most of the new standards. Migration is a pain either way because you have recompile all your software and libraries with new settings and train your developers in the new paradigm of the day.

From the link in post nearby yours one, it's clear it still misses features which are already implemented in GCC and Clang. Also, don't forget, that complete support for C99 landed only a few years ago, almost 15 years late. If this is not slow, I don't know what is slow then.

Microsoft never planned to support C99 in the C compiler, they have been pretty clear about that for more than 15 years.

GCC and Visual have a slightly different release cycle. GCC can move the minor version whenever they please and they do. Microsoft only add language changes in a new major releases, and sometimes port it back in a visual studio update pack, which are more spaced in time.

In both cases, the new release breaks the C++ ABI so updating is not something to be taken lightly.

There is also the debate of what "implemented" means. GCC can be obtained in alpha and beta, so you can test new features early long before they are finished or included in a regular release. All things considered, MSVC is maybe one year later on the latest cool thing. Not much.

Well, this is then even worse - why they do C compiler at all, if they are not going to support latest versions of standard. It's like shipping HTML4-only web-browser today. Pretty stupid, especially with all this marketing around. Either be in line with language development, or step down. Otherwise any action is harmful.

C and C++ have nothing to do with the frenzy of web technologies.

You are talking about slowness to adapt? So who implemented C11 fully? Only MSVC and Embarcadero.

What are you talking about?

GCC - https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/C11Status

Clang - https://clang.llvm.org/compatibility.html#c

Moreover, they enabled C11 by default.

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