No, it's entirely serious. But then I'm a fan of MSVC and especially the team they have behind it whom are all seriously impressive engineers at least out of the ones I've met. MSVC has lots of outstanding features no other compiler has:
* It's vastly faster to compile, like 5x-10x faster as it's not an AST based compiler like clang and GCC.
I find this claim interesting because in my (anecdotal) experience over the past few years, MSVC is significantly slower than Clang. It seems to be generally accepted that MSVC is the fastest, but that is just not my experience.
* It generates some very unique assembler which still beats the assembler coming out of clang/LLVM, though it has fallen behind GCC in recent years.
This is also contrary to my experience. I find that generally both clang and gcc generate better code on a more consistent basis. -- chris