<p><pre><code>    This may have been a bit of a discouraging post with respect to MSVC,
    but do not worry — in a subsequent post we’ll take a look at MSVC-specific 
    constructs which, while not necessarily standard-compliant, are nevertheless 
    interesting and often quite usable
</code></pre>
bah. Everything about the MSVC compiler is pretty much terrible.<p>Having some extra non standards compliant features in no way mitigates its terribleness.<p>The only good thing we can take from these articles is that yes, the guys at Microsoft have acknowledge how bad the situation is, and are actually trying to do something about it.<p>honestly? I&#x27;ll believe it when I see it.<p>Breaking backwards compatibility is a nightmare because lots of libraries depend on the very particular way the MSVC compiler works; but that means you can&#x27;t actually fix bugs.<p>So long story short, there&#x27;s probably never going to be a &#x27;good&#x27; version of MSVC. It&#x27;ll pretty much be stuck with its peculiarities forever.<p>Maybe one day we&#x27;ll get a &#x27;new&#x27; compiler that can sit along the legacy one and actually compile, you know, the C++ standard. I&#x27;m not holding my breath, but hey, we can daydream...