Kevin Cadieux

Finding Bugs with AddressSanitizer: Patterns from Open Source Projects

May 10th, 2021

AddressSanitizer (ASan) was officially released in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9. We recently used this feature to find and fix a bug in the MSVC compiler itself. To further validate the usefulness of our ASan implementation, we also used it on a collection of widely used open source projects where it found bugs in Boost, Azure IoT C SDK, ...

Faster C++ builds, simplified: a new metric for time

October 12th, 2020

C++ Build Insights is a collection of tools and APIs that can help you gain a deeper understanding of your build times. Today, we’d like to teach you about a special metric offered in this toolkit: the wall clock time responsibility (WCTR). It can be used to estimate how much time is really spent by each activity in your build, even in the ...

Introducing vcperf /timetrace for C++ build time analysis

August 27th, 2020

The following blog post was written by guest author Carlos Fraguas from Mercury Steam Entertainment. He describes how he used the C++ Build Insights SDK to add the new /timetrace option in vcperf, and how he also used it to build custom tools tailored to his team's needs. You can follow Carlos on Twitter using handle @MetanoKid.Hello! ...

Improving code generation time with C++ Build Insights

July 21st, 2020

Code generation time is a significant contributor to total build time for optimized builds. During this step of the compilation process, source code is passed through several algorithms that transform your program into an optimized version that can be executed more efficiently. In general, the optimization of a C++ function happens quickly and...

Profiling template metaprograms with C++ Build Insights

May 28th, 2020

The use of templates in C++ programs can sometimes lead to longer builds. C++ Build Insights puts tools at your disposal for analyzing template usage patterns and their associated impact on build time. In this article, we show you how to use the vcperf analysis tool and the C++ Build Insights SDK to understand and fix problematic template ...

Faster builds with PCH suggestions from C++ Build Insights

May 8th, 2020

The creation of a precompiled header (PCH) is a proven strategy for improving build times. A PCH eliminates the need to repeatedly parse a frequently included header by processing it only once at the beginning of a build. The selection of headers to precompile has traditionally been viewed as a guessing game, but not anymore! In this article, ...

Finding build bottlenecks with C++ Build Insights

April 22nd, 2020

C++ Build Insights offers more than one way to investigate your C++ build times. In this article, we discuss two methods that you can use to identify bottlenecks in your builds: manually by using the vcperf analysis tool, or programmatically with the C++ Build Insights SDK. We present a case study that shows how to use these tools to speed up ...

Analyze your builds programmatically with the C++ Build Insights SDK

March 6th, 2020

We're happy to announce today the release of the C++ Build Insights SDK, a framework that gives you access to MSVC build time information via C and C++ APIs. To accompany this release, we are making vcperf open source on GitHub. Because vcperf itself is built with the SDK, you can use it as a reference when developing your own tools. We’re ...

MSVC Backend Updates in Visual Studio 2019 Versions 16.3 and 16.4

January 28th, 2020

Versions 16.3 and 16.4 of Visual Studio 2019 brought many new improvements in code generation quality, build throughput, and security. If you still haven’t downloaded your copy, here is a brief overview of what you’ve been missing out on.Demonstration of C++ Build Insights, a new set of build analysis tools in Visual Studio 2019 ...

Introducing C++ Build Insights

November 5th, 2019

C++ builds should always be faster. In Visual Studio 2019 16.2, we’ve shown our commitment to this ideal by speeding up the linker significantly. Today, we are thrilled to announce a new collection of tools that will give you the power to make improvements of your own. If you've ever had time for breakfast while building C++, then you may ...