It may increase a bit. In fact the recently started C-based project Handmade Hero is done within Visual Studio so maybe that will spark some interest. The real

It may increase a bit. In fact the recently started C-based project Handmade Hero is done within Visual Studio so maybe that will spark some interest. The real advantage of mingw and other opensource tools is that you can use the same compiler on both Windows and Linux. With something like msys you can even get away with using a single Makefile. Also because C is a small language many professional C developers are unlikely to use an IDE and so would more likely use the windows sdk (assuming that still ships with the command line compiler which I'm not sure about).