I am the PM Lead for the C++ team at Microsoft and I can say that the 2 initiatives are not related. The Clang/LLVM integration in VS is a natural continuation

I am the PM Lead for the C++ team at Microsoft and I can say that the 2 initiatives are not related. The Clang/LLVM integration in VS is a natural continuation of our team's work to enable compelling cross-platform scenarios for all C++ developers, without imposing restrictions around the C++ tools you choose to use (https://aka.ms/cpp/launch/2019 https://aka.ms/cpp/launch/2019). So if you are already developing using Clang today, we want to make sure that VS is the best C++ IDE for you to do so, in the same way VS now also supports targeting Linux, CMake/CTest, Google Test and Boost.Test, clang-format, GCC and other non-MS C++ tools Visual Studio 2019 of course also comes with the new MSVC 19.20 toolset. Our goal with MSVC (https://aka.ms/msvc https://aka.ms/msvc) is to provide you with the best compiler choice on Windows for targeting Windows. Assuming you can choose your compiler, our recommendation is to use MSVC.