Microsoft bought a C Compiler from Lattice C years ago, and started Microsoft C (MSC). But after Borland and other commercial C compilers died off, Microsoft stopped adding anything to the C compiler except new security features in reaction to attacks. The C++ team owns the C compiler, and lets it starve, while feeding C++, as below post shows the leash C is on by the C++ team. Once C# became the top langauge, the C/C+ team not only was starved from budget, but also headcount (the good compiler engineers don’t want to work on the old C compiler, but the sexy new C# compiler, etc.).
Microsoft has a fork of LLVM’s clang (fresh, last update only 10 hours ago), and I’ve been assuming that they’d replace MSC with clang, like ARM and other other vendors are apparently doing. I’m unclear if Microsoft has replaced their old codebase, but they are adopting clang as part of their toolchain.
This is great news. Open source hackers won’t have to add a bunch of lame workarounds for dumb MSC. BEST YET, UEFI Forum might be able to revise it’s C language requirements, no longer dealing with the dumbest compiler from Redmond anymore. However, I think that Intel’s C compiler (ICC) may become the new blocking point for any language improvements to UEFI, I think. Once UEFI Forum sponsors someone to write LLVM front- and back-ends for EBC, then ARM and Microsoft (and other) toolchains will also get EBC support! 🙂
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/09/25/rejuvenating-the-microsoft-c-c-compiler.aspx
http://cppcon2015.sched.org/event/306cd32001a6e6b403a4495710cc3591#.VgwWSZeZeV4
https://github.com/Microsoft/clang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_C
Firmware Security 