I actually don't understand the original poster's slowness with Windows. We use Perforce and VC++ .slns, sometimes with apps split into DLLs and get none of the slowness the poster talks about. Actually we get significantly better performance with this than under Unix with GCC. No-change or small change rebuilds take a few seconds, with the time being dominated by the link and proportional to the link size.

Only if you are careful to only use the subset of the C++ spec supported by both compilers and avoid all gcc specific features.

In my experience, you don't have to be careful. I've written lot's of C++ that compile fine on Windows (using mingw/msys) or Linux/Mac using gcc. Can you provide an example of where gcc specific features are included w/o the developer explicitly doing so?

This is pretty common and not particularly difficult. Most large cross-platform C++ projects (ie most browsers and game engines) compile in both gcc and msvc. It is easy to naively write code in one compiler that won't build in another, but it's also easy to fix said code once you try to build it with another compiler.

I mentioned that in a context of application which is crossplatform already and when something is being developed, it affects (in most cases anyways) all platforms in the same way - so this limitation is "built-in" already.

Which might be a good choice for working on Chromium anyways, what with it being cross-platform :)

(Granted, there might be windows-specific stuff. I haven't checked the windows code)

They would be doing this anyway.