Really depends on your IDE. As an example, Visual Studio ships Microsoft's CPP compiler (MSVC [0]), but uses a completely different compiler frontend (namely ED

Really depends on your IDE. As an example, Visual Studio ships Microsoft's CPP compiler (MSVC [0]), but uses a completely different compiler frontend (namely EDG [1]) for IntelliSense. In a way, it does use a compiler to resolve the candidate functions, but it doesn't go through all the compilation stages. And it's not even the same compiler as when you hit compile :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B [1]: https://www.edg.com/ https://www.edg.com/