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

A few days ago, 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:

typedef struct foobar gazonk;
struct gazonk;

The C++ compiler which ships with VS.NET 2003 is quite impressed with those two lines:

  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

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 blog entry, 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...

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