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It worked even though it was not supposed to. Many months later when I really needed the functionality of a particular plugin of mine, I tried compiling it with an older version of Visual Studio, that was NOT suppose to work. And assumed that that information was indeed correct. I was not looking forward to that at all. There was a version of Maya, 2016 I think, where I had heard from official sources that you need to upgrade to a newer Visual Studio to be compile plugins that would be compatible with 2016. It would be amazing if Maya on Windows was that easy. On the other hand I have never compiled plugins on Linux, but as far as I am told you can do it in a terminal with all the tools that are included (by default?) with the OS. I have compiled a few plugins on windows over the years and find it a hassle to have to recompile, but even worse to upgrade the compiler. If anyone else knows of a way to compile c++ to mll without MSVisualStudio (in Windows of course) please share the secret if you feel generous. And there are tricks that work surprisingly well for bizarre unknown reasons. It's sometimes fun (and a masochistic waste of time) to try to optimize mel and python scripts to try to get them to perform much faster. However the sheer speed of a compiled plugin is VERY desirable. So you end having to change so much just to be able to compile. And sometimes specific versions of MSVisualStudio require you to upgrade your entire operating system too.

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It's just a huge thing to install and maintain. Not that there's anything wrong with MSVisualStudio. I would love to be able to compile mll plugins with any compiler instead of MSVisualStudio. mll you would need MSVisualStudio to somehow convert your py code to c++ and then compile it to mll. It has to be a version compatible with the particular version of Maya. To go from C++ code to mll you need MSVisualStudio C++. I would love to be corrected but I don't think there is a way to do what you are wondering.

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