Question

Well here’s a rather stupid question. Is Visual C++ JUST an IDE?? Or is it a language on its own for win32? What exactly would be the difference between the two? This I ask because I was trying out some of my old C++ code on VC++ 2008 and it wouldn’t compile.

Answer 1

Visual C++ can be many things, including:

1. Microsoft’s C++ compiler (cl.exe, link.exe etc)
2. The IDE (Visual Studio in C++ mode)
3. The C runtime (MSVCRT)
4. Other libraries (less so): MFC, ATL

As for compiling old C++ code: Visual Studio is now a fairly compliant C++ compiler. This was not always the case, such as with Visual C++ 6 or earlier. It is likely your code is not standards compliant or uses deprecated behavior, which simply doesn’t work on newer compilers.

Note: this paragraph is outdated: Visual C++ is unfortunately a poor C compiler, as it does not support C99 (and never will), unless features overlap between C++ and C99. The most notable issue for many people is the lack of stdint.h.

Visual C++ supports C11 and C17 starting with Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3

For many years Visual Studio has only supported C to the extent of it
being required for C++. Things are about to change now that a
conformant token-based preprocessor has been added to the compiler.
With the advent of two new compiler switches, /std:c11 and /std:c17,
we are officially supporting the latest ISO C language standards.