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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

There is no reason to use MSVC when clang-cl[1] exists. Both Google and Mozilla build their browsers for Windows platform for more than a year without using MSVC. So it is a pretty solid platform and ready for production.

[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html

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As barchar (my coworker on the STL team) mentioned, not only does Clang use MSVC’s STL on Windows, but also the support is from both Clang and Microsoft. We test MSVC’s STL with Clang as a first-class citizen, and have shipped features active for Clang before they were active for C1XX (MSVC’s compiler front-end), notably Class Template Argument Deduction.

Clang is a great compiler! We think it’s extra great with our STL. We added Clang/LLVM to the VS installer to make using it easier.

> not only does Clang use MSVC’s STL on Windows,

You can use libc++ nowadays. Works good enough for me.

std::filesystem? std::error_code?

yep! Clang-cl uses this library btw (I think it's possible to get libc++ sorta working on windows, but it's not something that's officially supported).

Other than using the multitude of Windows features and designer tooling not supported by clang-cl.

What exactly do you have in mind?

Drivers (Universal, UDF, KDF), COM/UWP, C++/CLI, Event Viewer resource libraries, C++AMP, WinUI, MFC, ATL, ...

It might be well for plain old Win32, but there is more than that across all Windows development scenarios.

Is there a good way to acquire all the headers and libraries available to MSVC on windows (MSVC, Windows SDK, ...) for use with clang-cl on Linux?

Last time I had to resort to copying the files from an installation on a Windows machine (which is not very convenient).

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