[GuestHNUser]

> Why not C99? stdint.h, declare-anywhere, etc.

> I still use MSVC 6 (1998) as my IDE because it has better human factors for me than later versions of MSVC.

This is really amusing to me. Does anyone know if the author has ever given more detail on why?

Also stb is a really great library to look at for those starting C development.

[ack_complete]

I used to be a VC6 holdout. It was the last version of Visual Studio that was written in native code and had a distinct Visual C++ subset as a product. After that, they rewrote the IDE in .NET, making it much slower and breaking a bunch of stuff. If you run VC6 on a modern computer, it's blazingly fast with a compact install, and doesn't have a bunch of non-C++ nonsense getting in the way.

Of course, you also have a C++ compiler from 1998 that doesn't use correct for loop scoping, barely works with templates, can't understand any C++11 or later constructs, barfs a page of angle-bracket meatloaf diagnostics whenever an error occurs in the STL, has a single-threaded build, and only works with a Windows XP era version of the Windows SDK. I gave it up around Visual Studio 2005 when the IDE became tolerable again.

[pjmlp]

You also have 1998 tooling for debugging, C++ code analysis, refactoring and 6 generations behind of VS improvements, including perf.

However not all is lost, for those that are deep into COM, the tooling has hardly changed, it is still mostly ATL as in 1998 (WRL, WIL, C++/WinRT still rely on the same VS 6 tooling).

[mischanix]

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BYKiOHdCNg

My attempted summary: it's mostly a matter of the window layout in VC6 giving the most real estate to Just Code, and also the hotkeys for common workflows (e.g. show/hide debug output) are simple.

Commentary: Modern MSVC tends to be more difficult to customize, whereas e.g. Jetbrains IDEs are more straightforward to customize in such a way as stb would be familiar with -- but, both MSVC and Jetbrains suffer from such awful performance (e.g. input latency) that it detracts from their usefulness as IDEs.

[mariusor]

Sean is part of the old guard of developers which (similar to Rob Pike) eschews modern conveniences like syntax highlighting because they find it distracting (I'm paraphrasing here). And I think it's a bit obnoxious to amuse yourself at the expense of the grandfathers of computing just because they enjoy doing things in a slightly archaic way.