Did you ever work on the cross edition that would compile Windows apps for the Mac? I think that was a version 4 fork that never got another version.
No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; the 32-bit and later 64-bit x86 backend was a different codebase from the 16-bit stuff.
Any idea how many devs are working at Microsoft on the C and C++ compilers these days? I've heard rumours that there's more on the Rust team and that C++ is taking a back seat.
No clue. I left as a full-time employee in 2007, did a few contractor gigs with various old teams of mine to help out, but that was done by 2013. I lost touch with how things were going internally after that.
If I remember from poking around at the 16 bit version in that timeframe (1.52?) there was still an option to generate P-code and (this is now nearly thirty years ago) that was used by Excel to minimize code size for the segmented 16 bit systems.
Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.