I am currently developing a 3d engine in Emscripten, and to deal with the debugging problem I've developed from the beginning for Windows. The project links with ANGLE to expose GLES2 APIs, and it has both Windows and Emscripten versions of the platform-dependent systems like file access and input. With all this, I spend most of my time in Visual Studio.
Also, for the sake of avoiding complexity, I made a point from the start to never use the STL, and compilation times have stayed nearly instant because of that. Code size is also really tiny when there aren't a million template types floating around.
This comes with the caveat that I'm more comfortable developing without the STL; for other developers or other projects, abandoning the STL may be a tradeoff not worth taking.
Also, for the sake of avoiding complexity, I made a point from the start to never use the STL, and compilation times have stayed nearly instant because of that. Code size is also really tiny when there aren't a million template types floating around.
This comes with the caveat that I'm more comfortable developing without the STL; for other developers or other projects, abandoning the STL may be a tradeoff not worth taking.