C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Books on C++17
This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library, the C++ standards committee, isocpp.org, CppCon, etc. Today’s post is by Marian Luparu. C++17 is an important evolution of the C++ language, and you may be wondering how you should get started learning about it. On our blog, you will always find the latest announcements related to our team’s work on C++17 and future standards and, as part of this new series,...
Chat with the Visual C++ Team at CppCon 2018
We are super excited to be returning to CppCon in Bellevue this year! We will have a table Monday – Friday where you can meet us and talk with us about Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and vcpkg. Additionally, we'd like to invite to you several sessions that folks from our team will be presenting this year: Monday, September 24th 14:00 – 15:00 How to Write Well-Behaved Value Wrappers by Sy Brand 15:15 – 16:15 How C++ Debuggers Work by Sy Brand Tuesday, September 25th 14:00 – 15:00 What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: A Tale of Expectations and Exceptions by Sy Brand and Phil Nash 15:15 – 15:45 Overl...
STL Features and Fixes in VS 2017 15.8
15.7 was our first feature complete C++17 library (except floating-point <charconv>), and in 15.8 we have addressed large numbers of outstanding bugs. As usual, we’ve maintained a detailed list of the STL fixes that are available. Visual Studio 2017 15.8 is available at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/. New Features We aren't actually driver developers ourselves and are interested in feedback in this area if there are things we can do to make these more usable in constrained environments. Correctness Fixes Performance and Throughp...
Parallel Custom Build Tools in Visual Studio 2017
Many projects need to use additional tools during their build to generate sources for further compilation or perform other custom build tasks. VC projects have always supported Custom Build Tool integration, but it had some limitations. One of the popular requests on UserVoice is Allow custom build tools to run in parallel. Another problem is that often custom build outputs need to be passed to other build tools (for instance, some tools can generate C/C++ sources, which need to be passed to the compiler) and there was no easy way to specify that. To solve these problems, we added support for parallel executio...
Exploring Clang Tooling, Part 0: Building Your Code with Clang
This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library, the C++ standards committee, isocpp.org, CppCon, etc. Today’s post is by guest author Stephen Kelly, who is a developer at Havok, a contributor to Qt and CMake and a blogger. This is the first post in a series where he is sharing his experience using Clang tooling in his current team. Conformance and Compatibility During the long development of C++ compilers so far, a few ...
Using C++17 Parallel Algorithms for Better Performance
This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library, the C++ standards committee, isocpp.org, CppCon, etc. Today’s post is by Billy O'Neal. C++17 added support for parallel algorithms to the standard library, to help programs take advantage of parallel execution for improved performance. MSVC first added experimental support for some algorithms in 15.5, and the experimental tag was removed in 15.7. The inte...
std::optional: How, when, and why
This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library, the C++ standards committee, isocpp.org, CppCon, etc. Today’s post is by Casey Carter. C++17 adds several new "vocabulary types" – types intended to be used in the interfaces between components from different sources – to the standard library. MSVC has been shipping implementations of , , and  since the Visual Studio 2017 release, but we haven't provided any...
Use the official Boost.Hana with MSVC 2017 Update 8 compiler
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We would like to share a progress update to our previous announcement regarding enabling Boost.Hana with MSVC compiler. Just as a quick background, Louis Dionne, the Boost.Hana author, and us have jointly agreed to provide a version of Boost.Hana in vcpkg to promote usage of the library among more C++ users from the Visual C++ community. We've identified a set of blocking bugs and workarounds and called them out in our previous blog, and stated that as we fix the remaining bugs, we will gradually update the version of Boost.Hana in vcpkg, ultimately removing it and replacing it with master repo. We can conduct th...
Q&A: How to specialize std::sort by binding the comparison function
This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: Visual C++, the standard language and library, the C++ standards committee, isocpp.org, CppCon, etc. Today's Q&A is by Herb Sutter. Question A reader recently asked: I am trying to specialize std::sort by binding the comparison function. I first tried: It couldn’t infer the parameter types. So then I tried: Is there a straightforward way to do this? Another example: Here bind has no trouble d...