It all depends on how cutting edge you want to be in the windows platform. If you want access to the latest technology, MS tools will always be the necessary choice -- Borland learned this lesson after a lot of hard work. But if you want to create products using the stable version of the windows API, gcc is already a very good choice.
I kind of disagree here. Compilers reached commodity status a long time ago. Nobody makes money off them compared to how it was in the 90s and the list of ex-compiler makers is as long as your arm (Watcom, Metrowerks etc).
'clang' is probably approaching the point that its good enough so the question for Microsoft is do they still see any value in continuing the develop their own compiler or should they just switch to 'clang' ?
I think this is the big shift we are seeing in MS this year. Instead trying to owning everything, they seem to be shifting their focus to owning the parts that have value and commoditizing the rest. The strategy was successful for Apple so its unsurprising that Microsoft is looking to a similar strategy as part of their salvation.
I agree with you.
What I am going to say might be foolish, but if you push this philosophy further, Windows might end up with a linux kernel. There is no value to make in the development of a kernel, they should stop it ! And since linux is better than wondows_NT, they should switch to linux.
I know, I know, that's foolish, but it would be so great if that could be true ^^
I think they want compatibility with other compilers, but unless they move alway from Windows, there is a lot of their APIs that require close compiler/library support: COM, DCOM+, .NET, etc. They will probably need at least to maintain VC++ for a long time.
If you mean C and C++ features, Microsoft standard conformance has slowly improved over the years from not giving a fuck to reasonable, but the only bleeding edge tools they've ever created are experimental research projects. They are completely out of clang and GCC's race to implement C and C++ standards and future standard changes.
If you mean some new API, they are libraries and all compilers have equal access to them.
