Yes, it's very annoying to see VC8 warnings on perfectly legal C constructs (AFAIK even sprinf is now considered "unsafe", MS wants everybody to use sprintf_s). But the optimisation capacities of VC8 are really great. Maybe someone can measure the speedup?
P.S. there's an "_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" flag that eliminates most of this kind of warnings. Also, #pragma 's can be used (although this isn't nice at all). P.P.S. are there any experiments with compiling CPython with Intel's compiler? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
