C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
vcpkg 2023.10.19 Release: Export for Manifests, Documentation Improvements, and More…
The 2023.10.19 release of the vcpkg package manager is available. This blog post summarizes changes from August 10th, 2023 to October 19th, 2023 for the Microsoft/vcpkg, Microsoft/vcpkg-tool, and Microsoft/vcpkg-docs GitHub repos. Some stats for this period: Key changes Notable changes for this release are summarized below. vcpkg export now supports manifest mode The vcpkg export command can be used to export built packages from the installed directory to a standalone SDK. A variety of formats are supported, including NuGet, a zip, or a raw directory. The SDK contains all pr...
Microsoft Visual C++ at CppCon 2023 Trip Report
The Visual C++ team attended CppCon 2023, the largest in-person C++ conference, in Aurora, Colorado from October 2-6th. There were over 700 attendees from the C++ community, and we really enjoyed getting a chance to meet all of you and talk about your unique backgrounds and C++ experiences. Some of our team member’s talks are now available to watch on YouTube so that you can watch them even if you missed CppCon to learn the latest for our tooling and more: The venue was at the Gaylord Rockies this year. The Gaylord Rockies is a resort with a massive convention center and many restaurants ...
Structured Diagnostics in the New Problem Details Window
Massive compiler errors which seem impossible to navigate are the bane of many C++ developers’ lives. It’s up to tools to provide a better experience to help you comprehend diagnostics and understand how to fix the root issue. I wrote Concepts Error Messages for Humans to explore some of the design space and now, due to the hard work of many folks working on Visual Studio, we have a better experience to share with you all. You can read about some of the work which has led up to these changes in Xiang Fan’s blog post on the future of C++ diagnostics in MSVC and Visual Studio. In Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 ...
Open Sourcing IFC SDK for C++ Modules
Back with VS2019 version 16.10, we announced a complete implementation of C++ Modules (and, generally, of all C++20 features) across the MSVC compiler toolset, static analysis, IntelliSense, and debugger. Implementing Modules requires principled intermediate representation of C++ source programs. Today, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the IFC SDK, a Microsoft implementation of the IFC Specification. This is an open-source project under the Apache 2-with-LLVM-exception license. The IFC Specification formalizes C++ programs as data amenable to semantics-based manipulation. We are open sourcing the I...
Build Reliable and Secure C++ programs — Microsoft Learn
“The world is built on C and C++” is no overstatement — C and C++ are foundational languages for our global society and are always in the world’s top 10 most heavily used languages now and for the foreseeable future. Visual Studio has always supported many programming languages and we encourage new languages and experiments; diversity and innovation are healthy and help progress the state of the art in software engineering. In Visual Studio we also remain heavily invested long-term in providing the best C and C++ tools and continuing to actively participate in ISO C++ standardization, because we know that our int...
Microsoft C++ Team at CppCon 2023
As always our team will be at CppCon this year with a host of presentations. Many of us will also be present at our team’s booth in the main hall for the first two days of the conference. Come say hi and let us know if you have any questions about our talks, products, or anything else! You can also join the #visual_studio channel on the CppCon Discord to talk to us (note: to join, head to #directory channel first, and check the checkbox next to "Visual Studio" box). We’re also running a survey on the C++ ecosystem. If you have a moment, please take our survey. It's quick and you could win a utility backpac...
MSVC ARM64 Optimizations in Visual Studio 2022 17.7
In Visual Studio 2022 version 17.6 we added a host of new ARM64 optimizations. In this 2nd edition of our blog, we will highlight some of the performance improvements to MSVC ARM64 compiler backend, we will discuss key optimizations in the Visual Studio 2022 version 17.7 for both scalar ISA and SIMD ISA (NEON). We started introducing these performance optimizations in 17.6 release and we have landed them in 17.7 release. By element operation ARM64 supports by-element operation in several instructions such as , , , etc. This feature allows a SIMD operand to be computed directly by a SIMD element using an index ...
C11 Threads in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 Preview 2
Back in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.5 Microsoft Visual C gained preliminary support for C11 atomics. We are happy to announce that support for the other major concurrency feature of C11, threads, is available in Visual Studio version 17.8 Preview 2. This should make it easier to port cross-platform C applications to Windows, without having to drag along a threading compatibility layer. Unlike C11 atomics, C11 threads do not share an ABI with C++’s facilities, but C++ programs can include the C11 threads header and call the functions just like any C program. Both are implemented in terms of the primitives pr...
MSVC Machine-Independent Optimizations in Visual Studio 2022 17.7
This blog post presents a selection of machine-independent optimizations that were added between Visual Studio versions 17.4 (released November 8, 2022) and 17.7 P3 (released July 11, 2023). Each optimization below shows assembly code for both X64 and ARM64 to show the machine-independent nature of the optimization. Optimizing Memory Across Block Boundaries When a small struct is loaded into a register, we can optimize field accesses to extract the correct bits from the register instead of accessing it through memory. Historically in MSVC, this optimization has been limited to memory accesses within the same ba...