I have a feeling it's just that making the optimising compiler available free postdates the release of that version of VC. Also, MS believe the bits worth the money are the IDE rather than the compiler (seems odd since I think a command line compiler is much easier to get to grips with, but I understand these IDE things are popular on the other side of the Win/Unix divide.)
I'm not so sure about the post-dating: the version numbers on the free-download optimising compiler and the Visual Studio noddy one are identical.
As for command line tools being more useful: well, the free-download compiler really is just a compiler - not even a make tool. So you'd have to use it with GNU make, which would then render your makefiles subtly incompatible with the nmake used by all other MSVC users.
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free-download optimising compiler and the Visual Studio noddy one
are identical.
As for command line tools being more useful: well, the free-download
compiler really is just a compiler - not even a make tool.
So you'd have to use it with GNU make, which would then render your
makefiles subtly incompatible with the
nmakeused byall other MSVC users.
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