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Recently, Microsoft is quite open about the future of VC++, unlike the years before, and things are looking good actually. Herb Sutter is busy working on Concur (see Concur & C++ Presentation at Google Video). Nice to see a real guru like him working on concurrency stuff, cause he might have a chance to get it working and used (after all, he is the chairman of the ISO C++ committee and the VC++ lead).
The VC++ compiler is getting a new frontend (with all the glory: A code model which gives access to the compiler’s AST which wasn’t available earlier because the compiler is partly 20 years old:
“In the days of the 256K limit, a large, in-memory structure such as a whole-program AST was not feasible”
Note this is all post-Orcas, so we’re talking about Visual Studio 201x here.
They’re also working on the native code side (even the vice president understood now that native code isn’t going anywhere), including stuff from C++ 0x. Interesting stuff going on for sure, after they have fallen behind with the compiler quite a bit compared to the latest Intel C++ or Sun Studio.
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Great work!