Comment by birn559
When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain at the very least (now at work computer at the moment, pretty sure I am wrong with the making here) with versioning that is close enough to each other to be confusing and related to each other in word ways. Naming itself also feels confusing to me. Documentation also only helps when you already have a good idea what's going on.
>When / How did versioning enter versioning the awkward state we have today? There is cl.exe, MSBuild and build chain
The multiple confusing version numbers are caused by each software component (e.g. "cl.exe" vs "msbuild.exe" vs IDE "devenv.exe" vs platform toolkit SDK) evolving separately over decades. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Inter...)
E.g. Today's "cl.exe" at version 19.x goes all the way back to 1983 with Microsoft C 1.0 for MS-DOS. Just a text-based command line compiler with no C++, no GUI, no "Studio", etc. 43 years of the core compiler going from 1.x to 19.x. The Visual IDE component of VC++ version 17.x has a different version history going back to 1993 with 1.0. Microsoft C# also has different version numbers of C# language version vs .NET version vs CLR version, etc.
It's analogous to Linux world of different tools with different version numbers. GCC is 15.x, glibc is 2.4, make is 4.4, etc. If you include a "visual GUI IDE" like Jetbrains CLion, that's yet another different version (252.x) that doesn't match any of the others.
Microsoft could hypothetically "synchronize/unify" all version numbers for all disparate products to be a single number ... akin to Apple using version "26" to synchronize Xcode with iOS, etc by introducing large numerical gaps like v18 --> v26. That's probably not going to happen. Likewise, different groups at GNU are not going to agree to synchronize all version numbers such that next release will be GCC 20.0, glibc 20.0, and make 20.0.