On 7/25/15 8:42 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:
Therefore VS2015 is the most important release of Visual Studio for all C++ users since VS2003 (which was the first to implement most of C++ 98). VS2015 is the release which fires the gun on no C++ programmer writing C++ 03 code any more.
If you even look at the Boost usership, there is a ton of people still on VS2005. That's because later VS's didn't offer anything new which was compelling for a C++ user. A quick informal straw poll at C++ Now found almost all of these had been experimenting with VS2015 CTP and were expecting to jump straight to VS2015.
Nothing is further from the truth. I can't remember all the language features introduced between vs2005 and 2015 but just rvalue refs, lambda's, variadic templates and macros are surely compelling enough. The main problem of MSVS is that they've had their niche market cornered ever since the very first, eye-opening version of Visual Studio came out. The dominance has hurt them ever since. Just like it has IExplorer. I do very much appreciate their efforts to keep up with the other compilers, but compared to clang and gcc, it's a crappy compiler any way (featurewise, compile time-wise, optimization-wise, etc) you look at it. That being said, their debugger, and to a lesser extent IDE, have no equals, although lack of competition has hurt there too.