On 23 July 2015 at 21:26, Chris Glover
No, it's entirely serious. But then I'm a fan of MSVC and especially the team they have behind it whom are all seriously impressive engineers at least out of the ones I've met. MSVC has lots of outstanding features no other compiler has:
* It's vastly faster to compile, like 5x-10x faster as it's not an AST based compiler like clang and GCC.
I find this claim interesting because in my (anecdotal) experience over the past few years, MSVC is significantly slower than Clang. It seems to be generally accepted that MSVC is the fastest, but that is just not my experience.
I'm also surprised with this statement (as a msvc-first user but still use clang and gcc regularly, but on linux). Maybe Niall meant mingw instead of gcc. I don't know how to compare msvc with clang on windows, last time I checked clang was not ready for production so it wouldn't be a fair comparison. There also seems to be very different performance characteristics depending on the kind of code (metaprog, etc.) from the different compilers so maybe Niall is in a very specific context.