What are the advantages/disadvantages between MS VS C++ 6.0 and MSVS C++ 2008?
The main reason for asking such a question is that there are still many decent programmers that prefer using the older version instead of the newest version.
Is there any reason the might prefer the older over the new?
Well, for one thing it may be because the executables built with MSVS 6 require only msvcrt.dll (C runtime) which is shipped with Windows now.
The MSVS 2008 executables need msvcrt9 shipped with them (or already installed).
Plus, you have a lot of OSS libraries already compiled for Windows 32 bit with the 6.0 C runtime, while for the 2008 C runtime you have to take the source and compile them yourself.
(most of those libraries are actually compiled with MinGW, which too uses the 6.0 C runtime - maybe that's another reason).
Visual C++ 2008 is much more standards compliant (Visual Studio 6 doesn't support the C++ standard set in 1998).
VS2008 has better compiler (much more standards compliant, better optimizations, ...).
VS6 has much faster IDE. VS2008 IDE has many nice features, but it is a low slower than VS6.
Quick list of improvements you'll see going from 6.0 to 2008:
One thing that people sometimes forget is that VS 6.0 is over 10 years old now! At this point, I don't see how anyone would want to stick with it.
Advantages of Visual Studio 2008 over Visual C++ 6.0:
Disadvantages of moving to Visual Studio 2008:
In the spirit of Joel's recent blog post, I've combined some of the other answers posted into a single answer (and made this a community-owned post, so I won't gain rep from it). I hope you don't mind. Many thanks to Laur, NeARAZ, 17 of 26, me.yahoo.com, and everyone else who answered. -- ChrisN
Besides the deployment mentioned above, the main advantage of MSVC 6.0 is speed. Because it is a 10 year old IDE it feels quite fast on a modern computer. The newer versions of Visual Studio offer more advanced features, but they come at a cost (complexity and slower speed).
But the biggest draw-back of MSVC 6.0 is its non-compliant C++-Compiler and Library. If you intend to do serious C++-Programming this is a show-stopper. If you only build MFC-Applications it is probably not much of a problem.
Visual C++ 6.0 integrates with memory tracking tools, such as Purify, HeapAgent, BoundsChecker and MemCheck, thoroughly and well since those memory tracking tools were actively maintained and aggressively sold after Visual C++ 6.0 came out.
However, since C++ has been out of vogue for a while, the companies that sell memory tracking tools still sell them but never update or integrate them with new Visual C++ versions, including Visual Studio 2008. So, using memory tracking tools with Visual Studio 2008 is frustrating, errorprone and, in some cases, impossible.
I would like to add that it's not the case that applications developed using Visual C++ 2008 must require more DLLs than those developed using Visual C++ 6.0. That's just the default project configuration.
If you go into your project properties, C/C++, Code Generation, then change your Runtime Library from Multi-threaded DLL and Multi-threaded Debug DLL (Release and Debug configurations) to Multi-threaded and Multi-threaded Debug, your application should then have fewer dependencies.
Off the top of my head, the advantages of the new Visual Studio are:
Disadvantages:
Since VC6 most of the focus of Visual Studio has been on C# and .NET, as well as other features, so some C++ old-timers see VC6 as the good old days. Things have improved in Visual Studio for C++ developers since those days, but not nearly as dramatically as for .NET users.
One way that VS2008 is significantly better than VC6 is that it can build C++ projects in parallel. This can result in significantly faster builds even on a single CPU system, but especially if you have multiple cores.
Did you know that MS VC6's implementation of the STL isn't thread-safe? In particular, the reference counting optimization in basic_string blows up even when compiled with the multi-threaded libraries. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813810
Visual C++ 6 can be very buggy at times compared to 2008. Some things in particular:
sometemplate<othertemplate<t>> not working, but sometemplate< othertemplate<t> > working)Sometimes developing in VS6 feels like trying to get websites looking good in internet explorer 5.5
If you install all service packs for VS6 you still have a solid IDE/compiler combo. As a software developer who have to release products in the wild (over Internet) I don't want to o ship the VC++ runtimes and .NET framework everytime (I can't bundle them directly in my installer/executable, its forbidden by Microsoft). You know, several megabytes of runtimes to run kilobytes of code is kinda stupid. VC++ 6.0 only need your executable and 2 .DLL at best.
Also, debug runtimes cannot be distributed with VC++ .NET, not really good when I have a client which need to do some debugging of my products :)
There is in my opinion the major reasons why I still use VC++ 6.0, but the IDE itself is ugly (ie: no tabbing support). I usually bypass the IDE limitations by using codeblocks instead (CodeBlocks support CL.EXE/LINK.EXE for all VC++ versions)
Cobolfoo