GCC worth using on Windows to replace MSVC?

Question

I currently develop in C++ on Windows, using Visual Studio 2010. After the official announcement of C++11, I have begun to use some of its features that are already available in

Answer 1

It can't be used as a direct swap-out replacement for the microsoft compilers, for a start it has a vastly different set of command line arguments and compiler specific options.

You can make use of MinGW or Cygwin to write software but introduce extra dependencies ( especially in the case of cygwin ).

One not often touted advantage of gcc over cl is that gcc can be used with ccache to drastically speed up rebuilds or distcc to build using several other machines as compiler slaves.