Comment by uecker
5 hours ago
Most of us liking a good language just did not use MSVC. I do not think many people who appreciate C's simplicity and stability would be happy with C++ / Rust. Zig is beautiful, but still limited in many ways and I would not use it outside of fun projects.
I don't even use Windows, but I need to write portable libraries. Unfortunately, MSVC does strongly influence the baseline, and it's not my decision if I want to be interoperable with other projects.
In my experience, Windows devs don't like being told to use a different toolchain. They may have projects tied to Visual Studio, dependencies that are MSVC-only or code written for quirks of MSVC's libc/CRT, or want unique MSVC build features.
I found it hard to convince people that C isn't just C (probably because C89 has been around forever, and many serious projects still target it). I look like an asshole when I demand them to switch to whole another toolchain, instead of me adding a few #ifdefs and macro hacks for some rare nice thing in C.
Honestly, paradoxically it's been easier to tell people to build Rust code instead (it has MSVC-compatible output with almost zero setup needed).
The good news is that MSVC has C17 support (still missing important optional features, but at least some progress).