To those Windows programmers -- What is the best C/C++ compiler for Windows? I am assuming it is the MSVC compiler but wanted to get the views of people with actual experience.
Depends what you do. The MS one is decent, the intel one suppoedly has serious plus points IN SOME LIMITED AREAS.
Yeah benchmarks look super good, although it's expensive (seriously who is going to buy it from them? They should just use it as a loss leader to market the speed of their chips).
It really depends on what you want to do, each has its own pros & cons. For general development it's hard to beat the MS tool chain on Windows, why anybody would want to torture themselves with gdb on Windows is beyond me. It's pretty easy to write code that compiles on most platforms, so there is no need to over commit to any specific OS. Of course if you're looking to shave machine cycles, then that's a whole different game... I do most of my development in VS on Windows, I keep a cmake project and occasionally run the code through GCC (on a Linux VM) just to see if it picks up anything. GCC is stricter on language stuff, but the MS optimizer is better.
Our coders use MSVC for development. Optimization and final build are done using the Intel compiler for higher performance.
Thanks all for the replies. I'm writing library code, so it looks like MSVC is going to be good given that most code is written in VS and MinGW/MSVC C++ ABIs are not compatible. Well I can just compile with everything, fo shizzle.