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Visual Studio 2008 released, TR1 support coming

Any­one fol­low­ing Vi­sual Stu­dio 2008 will know that al­though it of­fers a plethora of new fea­tures for the man­aged world, there was lit­tle focus on the un­man­aged side of things. Now that it is fi­nally out the door, I guess it’s a good time to look at what few new fea­tures are there for us un­man­aged C++ coders.

• Im­proved stan­dards con­for­mance with sup­port for friend tem­plates, an un­com­mon but pow­er­ful C++ fea­ture.
• In­trin­sic sup­port for SSSE3, SSE4.x, and SSE4a. These are mod­ern vec­tor in­struc­tions (SSE4a lit­er­ally just came out with AMD’s Phe­nom proces­sors!) that any­one in­ter­ested in writ­ing high‐per­for­mance code will want to be fa­mil­iar with.
• In­trin­sic sup­port for the CM­PX­CHG16B in­struc­tion. This in­struc­tion is es­sen­tial when writ­ing many lock-free al­go­rithms for the x64 plat­form. I’ve been lob­by­ing to have it added for a long time, so I’m es­pe­cially happy to fi­nally see it. Un­for­tu­nately, the gen­er­ated code in Beta 2 was very sub‐op­ti­mal (con­sid­er­ing the in­struc­tion is typ­i­cally used in very tight loops) so I may end up using as­sem­bly any­way! I’m anx­ious to see if it is im­proved in RTM.
• Im­proved op­ti­mizer, with sup­port for in­lin­ing tran­scen­den­tal func­tions and sched­ul­ing for the lat­est CPUs.
• Linker op­tions up­dated for Vista – abil­ity to spec­ify UAC and ad­dress space ran­dom­iza­tion prop­er­ties. For some rea­son, still no sup­port for DPI in­de­pen­dence so we’ll end up writ­ing man­i­fests any­way.
• We can fi­nally use those quad‐core CPUs that are com­ing out to re­duce our com­pile times with Multi‐threaded com­pil­ing.

Not much, huh? That’s be­cause Mi­crosoft was run­ning under the as­sump­tion that peo­ple would flock to C# and only use un­man­aged C++ to main­tain "legacy" code. Per­haps the best news so far, they’ve fi­nally re­al­ized their mis­take. Al­though they didn’t have time to put things into VC++ 2008, they have re‐com­mit­ted to un­man­aged code for the next ver­sion and in the mean­time made a small sep­a­rate an­nounce­ment that they will be bring­ing VC++ 2008 users a mostly com­plete TR1 im­ple­men­ta­tion up­date in early Jan­u­ary.

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