[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).