This blog post summarizes changes to the vcpkg package manager as part of the 2025.12.12 and 2026.01.16 registry releases and the 2025-11-13, 2025-11-18, 2025-11-19, 2025-12-05, and 2025-12-16 tool releases. These updates include support for targeting the Xbox GDK October 2025 update, removing a misleading and outdated output message, and other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Some stats for this period:

• There are now 2,750 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.
• 82 new ports were added to the curated registry.
• 504 ports were updated by December and 584 ports were updated in January. 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 15 main triplets.
• 182 community contributors made commits.
• The main vcpkg repo has over 7,300 forks and 26,600 stars on GitHub.

vcpkg changelog (2025.12.12, 2026.01.16 releases)

• Removed an outdated output message after running vcpkg upgrade that could mislead users (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1802).
• Updated vcpkg to understand new layout structure and environment variables for targeting Xbox as of the October 2025 Microsoft GDK update. (PRs: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1834, thanks @walbourn!).
  • GameDKLatest is associated with the ‘old’ layouts and only exists when they are optionally installed by October 2025 or by earlier GDKs. October 2024 GDK or later are still in-service.
  • GameDKXboxLatest is associated with the ‘new’ layouts which are always present for October 2025 or later.
• 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.