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I am having a hard time to make out whether the command line tool cl.exe is what people refer to when they are talking about "the MSVC compiler".

Are the two the same thing or do you use cl to control the compiler?

mrclng
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  • Sounds to me like a distinction without a difference. You type `cl mysource.cpp` on the command line - does it really matter whether `cl` is doing all the work, or delegates some or all of it to other binaries? Anyway, there are, in fact, a bunch of DLLs and EXEs involved. – Igor Tandetnik Dec 18 '18 at 14:45
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    The point is that I don't know whether cl IS MSCV or not. In other words is there something like an MSVC executable (that I can't find on my system)? If so, how is it different from the cl executable? – mrclng Dec 18 '18 at 14:56
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    Well, there's Visual Studio IDE, housed in `devenv.exe`. The command-line C++ compiler shipped with Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) product is indeed named `cl.exe` (at least, that's the entry point; it invokes a bunch of other tools). – Igor Tandetnik Dec 18 '18 at 15:00

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