What’s New in vcpkg (Apr 2026)

This blog post summarizes changes to the vcpkg package manager as part of the 2026.04.27 registry release and the 2026-04-06 and 2026-04-08 tool releases. These updates include improved locking for parallel builds, cross-platform PE dependency analysis, manifest support for the depend-info command, and other improvements and bug fixes.

• There are now 2,807 total ports available in the vcpkg curated registry. A port is a versioned recipe for building a package from source, such as a C or C++ library.
• 35 new ports were added to the curated registry.
• 370 ports were updated in April. 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 main triplets.
• 103 community contributors made commits.
• The main vcpkg repo has over 7,400 forks and 27,000 stars on GitHub.

vcpkg changelog (2026.04.27 release)

• The install locking file has been moved from VCPKG_ROOT to the installed directory. This allows multiple vcpkg instances sharing the same root to install to different locations without blocking each other. Additionally, locks have been added to the buildtrees and packages directories to improve reliability of parallel builds, particularly when using the MSBuild integration (PRs: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1938, Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1979).
• The z-applocal command is now cross-platform for PE dependency analysis, thanks @zynfly! (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1910).
• The vcpkg depend-info command now supports manifest mode, thanks @dg0yt! (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1909).
• CI terminology has been updated: supports expressions in port features are now treated as top-level, and the exclude concept has been replaced with skip for clearer semantics (PRs: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1955, Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1956).
• Fixed --skip-failures feature set divergence between PR and CI modes (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1958).
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Total ports available for tested triplets

While vcpkg supports a much larger variety of target platforms and architectures (as community triplets), 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 (listed by commit author or GitHub username):

Learn more

You can find the main release notes on GitHub. Recent updates to the vcpkg tool can be viewed on the vcpkg-tool Releases page. To contribute to vcpkg 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.