2 ms·

I worked in a small shop in the late nineties where we used gcc during development within the MS Windows environment because MS' own compiler (Visual C++, iirc)

I worked in a small shop in the late nineties where we used gcc during development within the MS Windows environment because MS' own compiler (Visual C++, iirc) produced either (depending on settings) no warnings or buried the relevant ones under those of questionable code in the system header files. We had to use MS's compiler for the final product, as gcc couldn't produce shared libraries in that environment at that time, otherwise we would have gladly used only gcc.

pjmlp 2y ago
Anyone that tries to use UNIX stuff on non-UNIX OSes ends up having to deal with interoperability pains, hence why cygwin and mingw keep being leaky abstractions, regardless how much better GCC might generate raw code versus VC++. Additionally, nowadays clang also ships alongside VC++, and is offically supported by Microsoft as well.