(2016-08-04, 5:06)Travis Cobbs Wrote: I've personally found the free Microsoft compilers to be pretty good over the years (especially more recently with C++), so I'm curious why you both feel that MinGW does a better job. Note: this post isn't intended to be at all negative: I'm honestly curious. Is it because of the 3rd-party toolkits you're using (Qt and wxWidgets)? Or is it so that you can use the same compiler on both Windows and Linux?When I started with LDCad is was looking for a seamless solution for developing multi platform, GCC seemed the only logical way to go as it is available almost everywhere. Also the msys/mingw stuff makes the building environment very Linux like so not only code will be portable but the makefile etc too.
I feel that the fact that LDView gets compiled on three completely different compilers (VC on Windows, gcc on Linux, and Clang on Mac) improves its code, because each compiler contributes warning messages that the others don't.
Being mainly a Delphi developer at the time I also wanted to have a minimal amount of dll dependencies as deploying is just so much easier that way.
It was quite a step back IDE wide though, but on the upside GDB integration with code::blocks is improving all the time.