Question

I keep reading about C99 and C++11 and all these totally sweet things that are getting added to the language standard that might be nice to use someday. However, we currently languish in the land of writing C++ in Visual Studio.

Will any of the new stuff in the standard ever get added to visual studio, or is Microsoft more interested in adding new C# variants to do that?

Edit: In addition to the accepted answer, I found the Visual C++ team blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/

And specifically, this post in it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190109064523/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2008/02/22/tr1-slide-decks/

Very useful. Thanks!

Answer 1

MS has a series of public replies to this, most of them blaming their users. Like this one:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/iso-c-standard-update/

Now, the Visual C++ compiler team receives the occasionally question as to why we haven’t implemented C99. It’s really based on interest from our users. Where we’ve received many requests for certain C99 features, we’ve tried to implement them (or analogues). A couple examples are variadic macros, long long, __pragma, __FUNCTION__, and __restrict. If there are other C99 features that you’d find useful in your work, let us know! We don’t hear much from our C users, so speak up and make yourselves heard

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=345360

Hi: unfortunately the overwhelming feadback we get from the majority of our users is that they would prefer that we focus on C++-0x instead of on C-99. We have "cherry-picked" certain popular C-99 features (variadic macros, long long) but beyond this we are unlikely to do much more in the C-99 space (at least in the short-term).

Jonathan Caves

Visual C++ Compiler Team.

This is a pretty sad state of affairs, but also makes sense if you suspect MS wants to lock users in: it makes it very hard to port modern gcc-based code into MSVC, which at least I find extremely painful.

A workaround exists, though: Note that Intel is much more enlightened on this. the Intel C compiler can handle C99 code and even has the same flags as gcc, making it much easier to port code between platforms. Also, the Intel compiler works in visual studio. So by scrapping MS COMPILER you can still use the MS IDE that you seem to think has some kind of value, and use C99 to your hearts content.

A more sensible approach is honestly to move over to Intel CC or gcc, and use Eclipse for your programming environment. Portability of code across Windows-Linux-Solaris-AIX-etc is usually important in my experience, and that is not at all supported by MS tools, unfortunately.