Claus Brod: It's official: Microsoft's compiler is twice as good as the HP-UX compiler! (24 Jan 2006)

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---+++ [[BlogOnSoftware20060124][It's official: Microsoft's compiler is twice as good as the HP-UX compiler!]] (24.1.2006)

<a href="DefinePrivatePublic200601#16">A few days ago</a>, I dissed good ol' =aCC= on the HP-UX platform,
but for political correctness, here's an amusing quirk in Microsoft's compiler as well.
Consider the following code:

<pre>
typedef struct foobar gazonk;
struct gazonk;
</pre>

The C++ compiler which ships with <nop>VS.NET 2003 is quite impressed with
those two lines:
<pre>
  fatal error C1001: INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR
  (compiler file 'msc1.cpp', line 2701)
  Please choose the Technical Support command on the Visual C++
  Help menu, or open the Technical Support help file for more information
</pre>

What the compiler really wants to tell me is that it does not want me to redefine
=gazonk=. The C++ compiler in VS 2005 gets this right.

If you refer back to the previous <a href="DefinePrivatePublic200601#16">blog entry</a>, you'll find
that it took me only one line to crash =aCC= on HP-UX. It took two lines in the above
example to crash Microsoft's compiler. Hence, I conclude that their compiler
is only half as bad as the HP-UX compiler.

If you want to argue with my reasoning, let me tell you that out there in the wild,
I have rarely seen a platform-vs-platform discussion based on
facts which were any better than that. Ahem... :D

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