He's talking about two-phase name lookup, which VS doesn't implement (yet?), but clang does (as it should, striving to be a standard-compliant compiler). Here's

He's talking about two-phase name lookup, which VS doesn't implement (yet?), but clang does (as it should, striving to be a standard-compliant compiler). Here's a nice article about it: http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.html http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/dreaded-two-phase-name-lookup.h... TL;DR: If a type, variable... depends on template parameters, code using it is checked when the template is instantiated with concrete template arguments. Otherwise it is checked when the template is defined. I don't quite understand why you call templates near-useless, if two-phase name lookup didn't exist?