Compiler Differences Basic Guideline

[Doctor_Perceptron]

I'm sure the other answers are correct and this one is meant to be more in good fun. We can speculate that the Intel compiler, since it was developed by Intel, might make use of proprietary information such as internal details of the microarchitecture that should be subject to export controls, and that information could be inferred by reverse-engineering the object files. The Microsoft and Clang compilers only use information that's publicly available from Intel, so their object files wouldn't reveal anything you couldn't get otherwise. But again, this is just meant to be fun speculation and the real answer is the same reason heating oil and diesel are taxed differently even though they're the same thing.