Mingw vs MSVC?

[vbman213]

I'm trying to find a good reason to stick with Mingw as my build environment. Is MSVC 2008 a better alternative? I hear it produces smaller and more efficient EXEs? I installed MSVC 2008 Express Edition, I'm currently running nmake on QT right now...

[axeljaeger]

Personally, I had a lot of trouble deploying binaries created with VS2005 because all that manifest-stuff. I guess, the situation is the same with VS2008. Try to deploy on of your applications if you do not want surprised later on.

Deploying mingw or MSVC 2003 and less was pretty easy: Just ship the compilier's libc and you are done.

[franz]

MSVC does produce smaller and slightly more efficient executables. On today's pc's you'll probably not even notice the difference though.

MSVC has a vcredist.exe somewhere in it's program directory. You have to ship that with your application. In any case, you can get the VC redistributables from the mickeysoft website somewhere.

[squidge]

It does produce smaller and possibly more efficient code. I'd go with QtCreator as IDE rather than standard VS, but the VS Debugger is far superior. If you use a commercial IDE enhancement on VS, then you can get much better than Qt Creator, but that can cost a lot of money (as they also require the paid-for VS, rather than Express edition).

Is it worth the cost? For an enthusiast programmer, I'd say not. If you make a living from coding, then sure.