Windows development: MinGW64 or MSVC ?

[kinke via digitalmars-d-ldc]

> I personally think that putting time into the MSVC target would 
> be better invested. Using the MSVC toolchain you have a much 
> better tooling, especially debugging and profiling. There are a 
> lot of tools which expect you to put out pdb debugging 
> information and mingw does not do that. Also personally I don't 
> know anyone who uses mingw on windows. Usually mingw is only 
> used if some open source project also wants to support windows 
> but has no "real" Windows developers. Everyone I know who makes 
> money with software development on windows uses Visual Studio 
> and MSVC.

I fully agree.

I'm also keen on getting LDC to support Win64, but I'm focusing 
entirely on MSVCRT 12+ (VS 2013+). In addition to the advantages 
of the MS toolchain on Windows mentioned by Benjamin, Microsoft 
have also vastly improved their C99 support in their latest 
runtimes so that the C99 MinGW-w64 C-runtime layer is often 
rendered obsolete (e.g., math.h, fenv.h). MSVCRT 14 (VS 2015) 
will improve C99 conformance in stdio.h, another important step.

The DMD guys still need to be motivated (note that LLVM has 
recently dropped support for VS < 2013):
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pulls/kinke