"Even Microsoft VS does it better?" I have yet to see any debugger that's better than Microsoft's. Their compiler is behind GCC, clang, and others, but their debugging environment is unmatched.

JVM code hotswapping is still more feature complete than edit and continue for managed code, which is still way too conservative to be very useful. It is not a clear overwhelming win for VS (perhaps it is for native, but I don't work with C++).

Reminds me of those quote I've heard a few times: "gdb is designed to make you hate using it, encouraging you to be more careful when you write code."