[jclay]

Related: It's an interesting time for C++ tooling in general. Based on conversations with a member of the Visual Studio team, I've come to understand they're responding to increasing competition from CLion. This was the driving force behind the decision to prioritize first-class CMake support in VS 2017. I also think they're taking notice of what's working well with VSCode and taking that into account for VS 2019 updates.

I've moved away from it for my C++ needs since it's just so complex. The vim extension works well, but beyond that I can't master any of the keyboard shortcuts as they're so different than any other editor I've used in the past. These days I use VSCode with VSCodeVim, cmake tools and clang-query (which is fantastic). I've been really loving working with this setup. I fire up VS 2017 with `devenv my_proj.sln` when I'm lacking any advanced performance profiling / debugging features, but this is increasingly rare.

Overall, with the clang developments in the last few years, you can entirely replace the MSVC tooling. PDB debugging, ABI-compat, etc. Now clang-query and this work by Apple will ensure the IDE experience is taken care of too. The competition is welcome.

[pjmlp]

Clion still has lots of catchup to do in mixed language debugging, GPGPU, multi-threaded debugging, DirectX debugging, COM/UWP development.

From what I see on online discussions, clang still isn't as good as VC++ in incremental compilation and linking support.

Then lets also see who gets modules first.

Interestingly we had Energize C++, Visual Age for C++ v4 (earlier versions were different) and C++ Builder. Had they managed to win a sizeable marketshare and such C++ nice productivity tooling would have been a thing much sooner.