Yesterday a video was posted to the Visual C++ blog in an attempt to answer community concerns about its future. The post hit a raw nerve with the C++ community with no response from the Visual C++ team as yet.



Craig S. is asking about ISO 2003 compliance around export:

I know that export was removed fro C++ 0x, but do you plan on fully supporting ISO 2003?

RJ stopped using Visual C++ after VC6:

Almost everything we need to develop with C++ is available free, like GCC, Boost, Qt, wxWidgets, Code::Blocks, SVN, CVS, Apache, mySQL, SQLite, Crypto++, OpenSSL, gSOAP, SOCI, ICU, OpenCV, FreeImage, ffmpeg, lib*, etc. I'm really glad that I don't have to use the slow and bloated VS IDE that is getting worse in every version.

Developer, jamome, feels C++ has become deprecated at MS and has moved to QT, which is a theme repeated several times by other devs:

I appreciate all the work gone into STL, but STL+MFC doesn't feel unified like QT

The most specific was Mike Diack who feels VC++ 6 was the last brilliant release. As to specifics that ire him:

1) WTL 8.1 is stuck in beta hell.



2) The help system still doesn't work, as Leo said and hasn't for years.



3) SxS DLLs are a pain, fortunately this DID get fixed in VS2010 - I hated it in 2005/8



4) The constant use of changing and incompatible solution/project file formats are a pig. Parsing the VS2010 ones can take so long now that Win7 can think the IDE has hung...



5) VS2010 wasn't the new 6, it wasn't even the new 2003. (Sorry Damien Watkins!)

Feature improvements were lacking in the video for future versions, but it didn't stop posters from making requests:



jschroedl commented:

When some of the following things are available in the IDE, THEN I'll feel like we're getting some love:



1. Refactoring support on par with C#



2. Distributed builds



3. F1 help works as expected



4. Native AND Managed symbols reliably available while debugging a mixed-mode app. Debug visualizers would be the cherry on top.



5. C++/CLI intellisense



6. C++ code snippet support

The consensus in the comments is the Microsoft C++ compiler is lagging behind modern alternatives like GCC in performance and compliance while alternative frameworks like QT are more elegant and compelling. InfoQ reader thoughts?