C++ Team Blog

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

Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios See 18.2X and 4.95X Link Time Improvements Respectively on Visual Studio 2019

February 2, 2021 Feb 2, 2021 02/2/21

David Li

The C++ team at Visual Studio has delivered substantial compile and link time improvements throughout Visual Studio 2019. Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios shares their link time improvement wins.

The Coalition Sees 27.9X Iteration Build Improvement with Visual Studio 2019

November 16, 2020 Nov 16, 2020 11/16/20

David Li

Visual Studio 2019 v16.8 Preview 3.2 introduces significant build and link time improvements. In this blog post, we detail how the team in The Coalition building Gears 5 tested the compile and link times in three different versions of Visual Studio.

Linker Enhancements in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2

March 25, 2014 Mar 25, 2014 03/25/14

Eric Battalio

For developer scenarios, linking takes the lion's share of the application's build time. From our investigation we know that the Visual C++ linker spends a large fraction of its time in preparing, merging and finally writing out debug information. This is especially true for non-Whole Program Optimization scenarios. In Visual Studio 2013 ...

The Visual C++ Linker best practices: Developer Iteration

October 29, 2013 Oct 29, 2013 10/29/13

Ankit Asthana

The time spent in the link phase could be a significant portion of an applications overall build time for most large projects. A user can quickly determine this by adding the '/time' flag to the linker command line. The 'Final: Total time' reports the total time spent in the link phase. There are essentially two primary scenarios to consider ...

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 General Availability

March 10, 2011 Mar 10, 2011 03/10/11

Diego Dagum - MSFT

If you guys follow Jason Zander’s (Visual Studio corporate Vice President) blog, you learned two days ago that the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 whose Beta had been released last December achieved final release stage. Today is generally available (last Tuesday was only for MSDN subscribers). You can get it from here. Let’s ...

VC++ Tip: Get detailed build throughput diagnostics using MSBuild, compiler and linker

April 1, 2010 Apr 1, 2010 04/1/10

Visual CPP Team

We know that build throughput for applications are a time crunch on developer productivity. We have spent some time on improving linker throughput and other areas in VS2010, and will continue to investigate improving overall build throughput in future releases. In this blog post, we will describe a couple of options to get diagnostics for ...

Linker throughput

September 10, 2009 Sep 10, 2009 09/10/09

Visual CPP Team

Hello, my name is Chandler Shen, a developer from the Visual C++ Shanghai team.We have made some changes in the upcoming Visual C++ 2010 release to improve the performance of linker. I would like to first give a brief overview of the linker and how we analyze the bottlenecks of current implementation. Later, I will describe the changes we made...

Linker warning LNK4221, and some tips to avoid it

July 21, 2009 Jul 21, 2009 07/21/09

Visual CPP Team

Hello, my name is Chandler Shen, a developer from Visual C++ Shanghai team. There is some confusion about warning LNK4221 and whether it is safe to ignore it. I would like to give an explanation on when you may encounter this warning and provide tips for some typical scenarios and workarounds. What does LNK4221 mean? When building ...

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