What’s New in the vcpkg 2023.12.12 Release

Augustin Popa

The 2023.12.12 release of the vcpkg package manager is available. This blog post summarizes changes from November 21^st, 2023 to December 12^th, 2023 for the Microsoft/vcpkg, Microsoft/vcpkg-tool, and Microsoft/vcpkg-docs GitHub repos.

Some stats for this period:

• 10 new ports were added to the open-source registry. A port is a versioned recipe for building a package from source, such as a C or C++ library.
• 208 updates were made to existing ports. As always, we validate each change to a port by building all other ports that depend on or are depended by the library that is being updated for our nine main triplets.
• There are now 2,362 total libraries available in the vcpkg public registry.
• 19 contributors submitted PRs, issues, or participated in discussions in the main repo.
• The main vcpkg repo has over 5,800 forks and 20,400 stars on GitHub.

Feature changes

• CMake usage information is now provided for pkgconfig files (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1268, thanks @autoantwort!).
• vcpkg will print port versions more frequently as part of its output to the user’s terminal while it is installing or modifying dependencies for improved transparency (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1292).
• Added an identifier to specify QNX as a platform in vcpkg.json (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1282, thanks @Arech!).

Bug fixes

• Fixed processor architecture environment variable not being set properly for some x64 systems (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1297).
• Other minor bugfixes.

Documentation changes

• Added Tutorial: Install and use packages with CMake in Visual Studio Code.
• Documented vcpkg_download_sourceforge and vcpkg_extract_archive helper functions.
• Some minor typo fixes and edits (thanks @FantasqueX, @JacobOgle, and @adentinger!).

Total ports available for tested triplets

While vcpkg supports a much larger variety of target platforms and architectures, the list above is validated exhaustively to ensure updated ports don’t break other ports in the catalog.

Thank you to our contributors

vcpkg couldn’t be where it is today without contributions from our open-source community. Thank you for your continued support! The following people contributed to the vcpkg, vcpkg-tool, or vcpkg-docs repos in this release:

• dg0yt (25 commits)
• Thomas1664 (9 commits)
• autoantwort (6 commits)
• RT2Code (2 commits)
• moritz-h (2 commits)
• alagoutte (2 commits)
• Neumann-A (2 commits)
• ilya-lavrenov (1 commit)
• talregev (1 commit)
• an-tao (1 commit)
• RealTimeChris (1 commit)
• Tradias (1 commit)
• jiayuehua (1 commit)
• JacobOgle (1 commit)
• FantasqueX (1 commit)
• adentinger (1 commit)

Is your company looking for a better C/C++ dependency management experience?

We are partnering with companies to help them get started with vcpkg and overcome any initial hurdles. We have also been making product and documentation changes based on feedback we receive from these partnerships. If you are interested in trying out vcpkg or just have some thoughts to share with us, feel free to reach out at vcpkg@microsoft.com.

Learn more

You can find the full 2023.12.12 release notes on GitHub for the main repo. Recent updates to the vcpkg tool can be viewed on the vcpkg-tool Releases page. To contribute to documentation, visit the vcpkg-docs repo. If you’re new to vcpkg or curious about how a package manager can make your life easier as a C/C++ developer, check out the vcpkg website – vcpkg.io.

If you would like to contribute to vcpkg and its library catalog, or want to give us feedback on anything, check out our GitHub repo. Please report bugs or request updates to ports in our issue tracker or join more general discussion in our discussion forum.

Augustin Popa Senior Product Manager, Microsoft C++ Team

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