Hacker News Reader

Wow, they go so far as to recommend gcc if you want "new" features. ~"We won't support those features, if you want them go use a more full featured product". Kind of makes it hard to keep peddling their product in the long term if they plan to lag behind no?

View on HN

Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is a profit center. The only reason they even used to charge for it was to not kill Borland's compiler business. As long as there's a C compiler for applications on their operating system, they're happy. If someone else writes it, so much the better.

Depends. From the article it seems they position their product as a C++ compiler. You don't expect your Haskell compiler to also do OCaml.

No, but I do expect my OCaml compiler to also do Caml.

No, but I do expect Microsoft to provide a C compiler of some kind that's remotely up to date.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com