C++ Team Blog

A Year of Conference Talks from the Microsoft C++ Team

Sy BrandJanuary 25, 2021Jan 25, 202101/25/21

As we learned to adapt to virtual conferences last year we presented more than 20 talks on a wide range of topics. I've collected them all here so you can easily learn about the latest advances in our tooling as well as the cutting edge of C++ features. C++ Europe (February) WSLConf (March) Pure Virtual C++ (April...

Windows ARM64 support for CMake projects in Visual Studio

ErikaJanuary 21, 2021Jan 21, 202101/21/21

In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9 Preview 3 we added support for deploying CMake projects to a remote Windows machine and debugging them with the Visual Studio remote tools. CMake developers targeting ARM64 Windows can now cross-compile (with cl or clang-cl), deploy, and debug their projects directly from Visual Studio. You can download and ...

MSVC Backend Updates in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9 Preview 3

Helena GreggJanuary 21, 2021Jan 21, 202101/21/21

In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9 Preview 3 we have continued to improve the C++ backend with new features, new and improved optimizations, build throughput improvements, and better security. Here is a brief list of improvements for you to review. Do you want to ...

Build Throughput Series: More Efficient Template Metaprogramming

Xiang FanJanuary 19, 2021Jan 19, 202101/19/21

In the previous blog post I shared how template specialization and template instantiation are processed in the MSVC compiler. We will now look at some examples from real-world code bases to show some ways to reduce the number of them. Example 1 This example is extracted from our own MSVC compiler code base. The code tries to apply several ...

C++ with Visual Studio and WSL2

ErikaJanuary 14, 2021Jan 14, 202101/14/21

Our team released native support for C++ with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Visual Studio in 2019. “Native support” means that all commands are executed locally instead of over a SSH connection. Since then, WSL2 has been announced and we’ve received questions about our support for WSL2 in Visual Studio. The purpose of this ...

Build Throughput Series: Template Metaprogramming Fundamentals

Xiang FanJanuary 14, 2021Jan 14, 202101/14/21

Template metaprogramming is popular and seen in many code bases. However, it often contributes to long compile times. When investigating build throughput improvement opportunities in large codebases, our finding is that more than one million template specializations and template instantiations is quite common and often provides optimization ...

Faster C++ Iteration Builds

Russ KeldorphJanuary 6, 2021Jan 6, 202101/6/21

We made improvements to C++ link time earlier in Visual Studio 2019, and we have more improvements to tell you about. As of version 16.7, we measure up to 5X improvement in some incremental linking and debugging scenarios and up to a 1.5X speedup in full linking. These represent some of the improvements The Coalition saw in their recent ...

Configure IntelliSense with CMake Toolchain Files in Visual Studio 2019 16.9 Preview 2

ErikaDecember 8, 2020Dec 8, 202012/8/20

Visual Studio can now configure IntelliSense in CMake projects based on the value of CMake variables set by CMake toolchain files. These improvements provide automatic IntelliSense configuration when a CMake toolchain file is used for configuration and build. For example, Visual Studio can now provide IntelliSense for CMake projects using an ...

Visual Studio Code C++ Extension: ARM and ARM64 support

Julia ReidDecember 8, 2020Dec 8, 202012/8/20

The latest release of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension brings C++ IntelliSense and build support for Windows ARM64, Linux ARM and Linux ARM64 architectures. What’s more, you can download VS Code builds for ARM and ARM64 architectures, meaning you can officially use VS Code and the C++ extension on a Raspberry Pi, Chromebook, Surface Pro ...

Conditionally Trivial Special Member Functions

Sy BrandNovember 20, 2020Nov 20, 202011/20/20

The C++ standards committee is currently focusing on adding features to the language which can simplify code. One small example of this in C++20 is conditionally trivial special member functions, which we added support for in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8. Its benefit isn’t immediately obvious unless you’ve been deep down the rabbit hole...