<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>terrymah</author><text>Current VS-compiler dev here, the backend codegen team to be more precise (I actually own PGO). I wish this comment had been written in few days/weeks/months so I answer directly and talk specifics about some of the work that went into VS2013, but for now I just want you to know we&apos;ve aware of all of the issues you brought up, and have either worked on or plan to work on many of them.&lt;p&gt;RE: likely/unlikely, VS has __assume(0), which isn&apos;t exactly the same thing I know, but it is something and does help. I&apos;m actually in favor of us doing more with static annotations to bring PGO style optimizations to non-PGO builds. If you feel the same way please be louder about it, but realize there is a vocal group of people who consider static annotations harmful (and they have a large body of evidence in __forceinline backing them up).&lt;p&gt;oprofile: There is ETW/xperf, and of course a variety of instrumented profilers (both shipping and internal)&lt;p&gt;Although I do wish my team was larger, and it doesn&apos;t get all the love that some of the more flashing UI stuff does, I wouldn&apos;t go as far as to say the toolchain is withering. Some of the smartest people I know are working on my team with me on these problems.</text><parent_chain><item><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>I wish they would dedicate more time to improving cl.exe and link.exe in terms of performance and language support and less time with these hokey team visualization gimics.&lt;p&gt;Every release since 2008 has been getting slower and slower for C++, the C compiler is awful, PGO instrumentation in Win8 is less capable, and there&apos;s no equivalents in the Windows ecosystem to gcc&apos;s likely/unlikely, oprofile, or valgrind.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s at the point now where developing on Windows vs Linux is a serious performance and security impediment due to their withering native toolchain.  But I guess nobody over there gets promoted for fixing the hard stuff.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>sriramk</author><text>ex-VS person here (from 5 years ago though).&lt;p&gt;It is never an either-or. It is always a complex mix of what customers ask for, what the strategic priorities/market realities are.&lt;p&gt;Often the problem with these queries is that there are not enough devs complaining to MSFT. No PM/engg manager is going to ignore a bug/problem if it shows up high in customer requests.&lt;p&gt;On promotions - I think it&apos;s the reverse problem. People only get promoted for working on something that&apos;s perceived to be hard.</text><parent_chain><item><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>I wish they would dedicate more time to improving cl.exe and link.exe in terms of performance and language support and less time with these hokey team visualization gimics.&lt;p&gt;Every release since 2008 has been getting slower and slower for C++, the C compiler is awful, PGO instrumentation in Win8 is less capable, and there&apos;s no equivalents in the Windows ecosystem to gcc&apos;s likely/unlikely, oprofile, or valgrind.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s at the point now where developing on Windows vs Linux is a serious performance and security impediment due to their withering native toolchain.  But I guess nobody over there gets promoted for fixing the hard stuff.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx</url></story>