We are pleased to echo NVIDIA’s announcement for CUDA 10.1 today, and are particularly excited about CUDA 10.1’s continued compatibility for Visual Studio. CUDA 10.1 will work with RC, RTW and future updates of Visual Studio 2019. To stay committed to our promise for a Pain-free upgrade to any version of Visual Studio 2017 that also carries forward to Visual Studio 2019, we partnered closely with NVIDIA for the past few months to make sure CUDA users can easily migrate between Visual Studio versions. Congratulations to NVIDIA for this milestone and thank you for a great collaboration!

A Bit of Background

In various updates of Visual Studio 2017 (e.g. 15.5) and even earlier major Visual Studio versions, we discovered that some of the library headers became incompatible with CUDA’s NVCC compiler in 9.x versions. The crux of the problem is about two C++ compilers adding modern C++ standard features at different paces but having to work with a common set of C++ headers (e.g. STL headers). We heard from many of you that this issue is forcing you to stay behind on older versions of Visual Studio. Thank you for that feedback. Together with NVIDIA, we have a solution in place that enables all Visual Studio 2017 updates and Visual Studio 2019 versions to work with CUDA 10.0+ tools. This is also reinforced by both sides adding tests and validation processes as part of release quality gates. For example, we continue to run (NVIDIA/Cutlass), a CUDA C++ project, as part of our MSVC Real-World Testing repository as a requirement for shipping. We also have targeted unit tests for PR build validations to guard against potential incompatibility issues.

In closing

We’d love for you to download Visual Studio 2019 RC and try out all the new C++ features and improvements. As always, we welcome your feedback. We can be reached via the comments below or via email (visualcpp@microsoft.com). If you encounter other problems with MSVC in Visual Studio 2019 please let us know through Help > Report A Problem in the product, or via Developer Community. Let us know your suggestions through UserVoice. You can also find us on Twitter (@VisualC) and Facebook (msftvisualcpp).