C++ Team Blog

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

Linker Enhancements in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2

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

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

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 ...

Linker throughput

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

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 ...