Title is pretty straightforward. Stupid question but I’m just generally curious.
Personally my favourite is MSVC because well GCC is just slower on Windows, but GCC has the upper edge in working on anything below Win7.
What is your favourite C compiler?
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ownedbywuigi
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What is your favourite C compiler?
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athenian200
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Re: What is your favourite C compiler?
I would also say MSVC is my favorite on Windows.
Between Clang and GCC on Windows though, I would have to give the win to Clang there. Clang-cl does better than GCC if you're using anything other than MSVC to build Windows binaries, and also has the advantage of accepting MSVC-style command line arguments, while being more compatible with GNU Make in subtle ways. Mozilla picked it for a reason, we just didn't want to give up the performance advantages of MSVC binaries. GCC is probably the worst of the three options for Windows, which I'm sad to say because I like it on other platforms.
Though I am not as thrilled with the idea of using Clang on Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. For one thing, GCC has much better compatibility with SunOS than Clang does, and also seems to produce better binaries on Linux.
So overall my take is:
MSVC is best on Windows but doesn't work anywhere else. GCC is better on non-Windows especially on less popular platforms, Clang is basically "good enough" on Windows and Linux in a variety of contexts, but isn't really something you'd pick unless you just want to standardize on one compiler for all platforms and have something uniform.
Between Clang and GCC on Windows though, I would have to give the win to Clang there. Clang-cl does better than GCC if you're using anything other than MSVC to build Windows binaries, and also has the advantage of accepting MSVC-style command line arguments, while being more compatible with GNU Make in subtle ways. Mozilla picked it for a reason, we just didn't want to give up the performance advantages of MSVC binaries. GCC is probably the worst of the three options for Windows, which I'm sad to say because I like it on other platforms.
Though I am not as thrilled with the idea of using Clang on Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. For one thing, GCC has much better compatibility with SunOS than Clang does, and also seems to produce better binaries on Linux.
So overall my take is:
MSVC is best on Windows but doesn't work anywhere else. GCC is better on non-Windows especially on less popular platforms, Clang is basically "good enough" on Windows and Linux in a variety of contexts, but isn't really something you'd pick unless you just want to standardize on one compiler for all platforms and have something uniform.
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ownedbywuigi
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Re: What is your favourite C compiler?
Oracle still maintains SunOS/Solaris?? I thought they killed it in like 2015?athenian200 wrote: ↑2026-04-20, 06:25Though I am not as thrilled with the idea of using Clang on Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. For one thing, GCC has much better compatibility with SunOS than Clang does, and also seems to produce better binaries on Linux.
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