C++ Team Blog

The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team

What’s New for C++ Developers in Visual Studio 2022 17.8

We are happy to announce that Visual Studio 2022 version 17.8 is now generally available! This post summarizes the new features you can find in this release for C++. You can download Visual Studio 2022 from the Visual Studio downloads page or upgrade your existing installation by following the Update Visual Studio Learn page. Standard ...

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.(image) Some of our team member’s talks are now ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Microsoft C++ Team at CppCon 2023

(image) 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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...