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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
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    6

    [RESOLVED] C++ standardization and other issues.

    First of all, a big thanks to the members of VC++ team for taking their time to chat with us and answer our questions. Also a big thanks for making a great product that VC++ is.

    Now to my questions

    1. C++ Standardization process. In the discussion following Dr Stroustrup's article on the next incarnation of C++ standard, http://www.artima.com/cppsource/cpp0x.html some of us were shocked to find out that the work on standardization is done more or less as a volunteer effort. This was given as an explanation for the lack of i.e. Unicode, XML, modules and other libraries and language features that we painfully miss in standard C++. Would it make sense that major compiler vendors (Microsoft being the most important, IMHO) put more resources into making the C++ standard more complete, similar to what VC++ team did with C (safe libraries)?

    2. VC++ compilation times. While VC8 offers some exciting new features and optimizations, the compilation has become as slow as gcc. OK, not really compilation, but linking. Obviously, we can't expect compilation time of C++ code to match say C#, but I really can't explain why is it so slow compared to earlier versions, especially in Debug mode.

    3. Standard conformance. We have heard many time that "export" is expensive to implement. Would it make more sense for VC++ front-end team to concentrate on C++/CLI, and for the native C++ purchase EDG front end?

    4. STL speed. Many developers I know are astonished that the STL implementation that ships with VC++ is slower and slower with every new version. In one case, a developer managed to cut the run time of his application by almost 50% just by using STLPort instead of the Dinkumware library that comes with VC++2005 (if you understand Serbian check it on this link http://www.elitesecurity.org/tema/172799/1#1125074).

    5. IDE issues (not sure if this is appropriate question for the VC++ group). Intellisense and code completion are pretty much broken, and the "Updating Intellisense" message that can freeze VS for several minutes is really frustrating. Would it be simpler and more effective to implement something like vim's Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N. In fact, I would love to see vim as a default editor for MSVS, but that opinion is probably not very popular among VS developers

    6. Support for native libraries. Again, not sure if you are the right people to answer this. Do you know that Paul DiLascia until recently didn't know that ATL had a regexp class? I think that tells something about the coverage of native C++ libraries in MSDN documentation. Also, ATL Server was killed by the poor name choice, IMHO. Technically speaking it is a great library, and I have succesfully used it in the past to build a web service, but pretty much no-one knows about it, or what it is for.

    After all this criticism, let me repeat once again that VC++ is a great product. These days I spend a lot of times with gcc, vim and gdb (oh horror!) and whenever I get back to VC++ it feels like I am back in 21st century after spending some time in dark ages. Well, except that vim rocks

    Thanks again for your time and best wishes.
    Last edited by Nemanja Trifunovic; June 19th, 2006 at 06:16 AM.

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