Comment by codingthebeach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingthebeach | Hacker News Reader

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It would be nice if you wouldn't derail the conversation with another tired old "but it's not as good as gcc when it comes to X". This is a CTP. You split hairs over minor points of standards compliance that many devs won't even use on gcc yet because the features are so new, and completely avoid mentioning that the productivity of Visual Studio (for both .NET as well as native C++, including cross-platform C++) arguably dwarfs any other IDE on the market. Have you used, I mean really used, a recent version of Visual Studio for C++ work? Or are you making this comment because you haven't and you find it threatening? Tell you what. You build your C++ app with Xcode 6 or command-line gcc for all it matters. I'll build mine with Visual Studio 2013 or later. We'll see who wins. By the way, I love gcc. Love, love, love. That doesn't mean I have to take pot shots at Visual Studio, which is tooled to the Nth, completely stable, and not at all the old restrictive MS dev environment of yore. The times have changed.

It is a fair question given the fact that Visual Studio 2013 doesn't even support basic C++11 features like constexpr. When doing multi-platform C++11 work the code usually must be dumbed down a lot if it needs to compile also in VStudio, e.g.:

- can't use many of the new initializer mechanisms in the class declaration (initializer lists, etc...)

- no constexpr

- std::chrono high resolution click isn't actually high resolution but only has millisecond accuracy

Complete list of missing C++11 features up to VS2013 is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh567368.aspx

Microsoft should first complete their C++11 support before moving on to C++14, otherwise it will probably never get fixed.

Visual Studio is a fine IDE, but the C++ compiler lags behind quite a bit.

Microsoft obviously should NOT first "complete" their C++11 support since there may very well be more important features in C++14 than some arcane features no-one would use in C++11. Same applies to all the other compiler vendors and all versions of the standard.

Arcane features that no-one uses should not be in the standard but in some sort of optional extension, and a feature that is not supported by all major compilers might as well not exist, since it cannot be used in a portable code base.

The init list bug has been fixed for 2015 RTM. Also, I fixed the clocks back in 2015 CTP1 (alpha 1). Sorry about that bug, we just didn't get a chance to fix it in 2013 - in that release we were insanely busy converting the whole STL over to real variadic templates.

Nice! Thanks a lot for your hard work, it's really appreciated despite my ranting ;)

Parity on standard compliance matters because many of us want to compile our code on different platforms, and that is all we download MSVC for. FWIW, it is also the only thing I look for in the gcc and Xcode/clang change logs.

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