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Comment by foobarbazqux | Hacker News Reader

> It makes me wonder how many people there are like me who would be willing to pay $100/year for a bespoke C compiler that was supported by a single source and stable.

Did you look at ICC / XLC / MSVC? They typically outperform GCC by about 20%, although I haven't checked in a while.

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You should probably check again, but in any case MSVC shouldn't be compared to gcc/icc/clang - it can't even compile code written for a 14 year old language specification (C99), so no sane person should use it for C development these days.

FWIW, Microsoft hasn't made an effort to support much of C99 because almost none of their users (Windows and XBox developers) use C. I don't know any Windows or XBox programmers who uses C.

Your point is still valid: if you want to compile C99 code, MSVC is not even an option.

It depends on the features you use. If all you want is variadic macros, long long, __FUNCTION__, and stdint.h, it has those things.

If you don't care about sticking to C, you can usually get what you want with a C++ feature anyway.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3879636/what-can-be-done-...

Up to some point in the past, MSVC produced better code than GCC, but most recent benchmarks have them roughly equal. MSVC has actually gotten slower in the last couple iterations, but not by a lot.

I have ICC-ARM which has out performed GCC for a while. I still use arm-none-eabi-gcc for things which I expect other people to build.

I'm not sure MSVC produces faster code than gcc. Icc does, but MSVC doesn't.

Note: our build system uses three compilers.

Actually, more like The Portland Group: http://www.pgroup.com/

In my experience gcc has fewer bugs than icc or xlc.

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