Of course they wouldn't have to do that if they had a functioning C compiler. But snark aside, this is going to help GCC and CLang which will be able to target

Of course they wouldn't have to do that if they had a functioning C compiler. But snark aside, this is going to help GCC and CLang which will be able to target the stable runtimes. It doesn't matter than VCRuntime will continue to be versioned since each compiler will provide its own startup and EH (they already do). In fact, I wonder if this is a move to begin officially supporting alternate compilers. Is VCExpress going to be replaced with a LLVM-based package? Will it be possible to create a shim msvcrt.dll that forwards to the new libraries? Then old programs can finally take advantage of bug fixes.