This, exactly. MSVC is full of extensions so heinous and horrible to make you scream when you sleep at night. They probably pledged to support those until the end of time, so I guess they would have to keep CL around forever.

Also, if you manage to overcome how horrible their CLI tools are, Microsoft's CL is a nice C++ compiler. Their STL support is great nowadays and lots of things just work; I even had seen times where they were _stricter_ about standards than Clang/GCC, which honestly shocked me.