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Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

Bit of topic, but out of interest, why do you buy/use/need the Microsoft toolchain?

(I work on open source stuff and I've only ever used GCC and Clang - I'm not asking this as a rhetorical way to say you're stupid, I'm genuinely ignorant of the advantages).

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I can't speak for the original poster's use case, but wanted to point out that the Microsoft compilers are free (as in beer) anyway. They do charge an arm and a leg for things like Team Foundation Server or whatever but the fully functional (32 and 64 bit) compilers, linkers, nmake, etc ship with the free Windows SDK. And even most of the useful IDE stuff is available for free in the VS Express editions.

1 - Works pretty much "out of the box". And with the latest APIs Windows just added. (Something that I tried making work on MingW but I got working only with the MS toolchain: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945061.aspx)

2 - The IDEs are good. Not great, buggy sometimes, but they help you with the more hairy things in Windows.

3 - Even if it's something like C# that would be easy to do with the Free IDEs, it's helpful

So, to sum it up, developer convenience.

Its some of what raverbashing has said. We are doing some lower level Windows stuff with it and share code with other groups. We tried VC Express about 5 or more years ago but found that some stuff did not work properly and haven't revisited. Engineering time wins out over $300-$400 cost / dev every 4 or 5 years.

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