Fair enough, except that I imagine what you mean by "insecure" is that they are prone to be if not used properly. So if the "security improvement" is like, commands that do not allow buffer overflows no matter how dumb the programmer, that is asking to excuse dumb programmers. It is C. It is low level. You do your own memory management. That is what it is for. Otherwise, you might as well use another language.
So that whole spiel sounds a great cover story to me. After all, they cannot actually say, "Oh, we are doing this in the interest of intentional incompatibility on the recommendation of the business division", which is more likely.
Do you mean VS6 used GCC 1.0? I'm not sure if this is such a good comparison otherwise, since GCC 1.0 was obsoleted in like 1989.No. VS6 is old and lacking in the standards compliant area.
Newer editions are standards compliant, so upgrading will break the code. That is why they don't upgrade.
And don't blame Microsoft. The same thing would happen to any company that used GCC 1.0.
But it looks to me like VS6 is considerably newer than that!