As you already hinted at in your article, the choice of MSVC++ as the "best" Windows C++ compiler is highly debatable. GCC, Clang and ICC will all generate significantly faster binaries for your code examples and, in the case of ICC, automatically parallelize the loop and take advantage of any SIMD instructions (up to AVX-512) available on your hardware. It doesn't always get everything right, but for simple cases it's usually very close to optimal in my experience, and vastly superior to MSVC++.