[RESOLVED] C++ standardization and other issues.

[joncaves]

Hi Nemanja: that is a set of really good questions :-). I'll try to answer the ones that I have knowledge of and hopefully the rest of the team can jump in and fill-in the gaps :-)

1) Yes, the standardization of C++ is a purely voluntary process. I, along with Herb Sutter, are the Microsoft representatives on the ISO C++ Committee and we are all volunteers. But if you want a truely independent Standard this is the best way to do it. If any company was tasked with developing a library for the C++ Standard there would be a natural, and completely understandable, bias towards technologies that the tasked company supports. Have you had a look at Boost (www.boost.org)? Boost is an incredibly supportive development and proving ground for new C++ libraries - if you feel there should be a library for Unicode (warning: this one is a political minefield), XML, etc., this is probably the best place to start.

2) Are you compiling managed code? I build the Visual C++ compiler many times a day and I never find the link times a problem. I know there are issues with managed code and, yes, we are working on a solution.

3) Ah "export" - less said the better :-) I know the EDG guys well and I can tell you that they still bare the scares from implementing "export". There has got to be a better way to compile templates - problem is I am not certain that "export" is it.

4) STL performace - are we talking debug or retail? As you may be aware we get our STL implementation from Dinkumware and for Visual C++ 8.0 Bill Plauger added a *lot* of checking in debug mode. When we first picked up the new version (yes: we dogfood in Visual C++ :-)) it broke the compiler but it was all due to problems in our code (bad compiler: decrementing an iterator passed the start of a container) but we didn't see any performance related issues: though I know that there are a few. They were reported and confirmed on the C++ forums on MSDN. I'll try to track down the specific issues tomorrow (or someone from the libraries can jump in).

The rest of your questions I'll leave up to the others :-)

Jonathan Caves
Visual C++ Compiler Team