With Visual Studio ‘15’ our goal is to considerably improve productivity for C++ developers. With this goal in mind we are introducing many new improvements, which you can try out in the recently released Preview 5 build. The highlights of this release include the following:

Faster C++ solution load

‘Fast project load’ is a new experimental feature for C++ projects. The first time you open a C++ project it will load faster, and the time after that it will load even faster! To try out this experimental feature set ‘Enable Faster Project Load’ to true in Tools -> Options as shown in the figure below:

The small demo below depicts these improvements on the large Chromium Visual Studio Solution which has 1968 projects. Check out this blog post to learn more about how faster C++ solution load operates.

There is another experimental effort underway in Visual Studio to improve solution load called “lightweight solution load”.  This is a completely different approach and you can read about it here.
Generally, it will avoid loading projects at all and will only load a project when a user explicitly expands a project in Solution Explorer.  The C++ team has been focused on Fast Project Load and so our support for lightweight solution load is currently minimal.  In the RC release of Visual Studio 15, we expect to support fast project load feature in conjunction with Lightweight Solution Load.  This combination should provide a great experience.

Faster build cycle with /Debug:fastlink

Developer builds will now build faster, because of faster links with an integrated /debug:fastlink experience. Expect to see 2-4x linker improvements for your application builds.

The figure below illustrates how /debug:fastlink helps improve link times for some popular C++ sources. You can learn more about /debug:fastlink and its integration into Visual Studio in the Faster C++ build cycle blog post we published last week.

Reducing out-of-memory crashes in VS while debugging

With VS “15” Preview 5, we have also taken a step towards reducing memory consumed by symbol information, while maintaining the performance benefit of pre-fetching symbol data. We now enable pre-fetching only on modules that are relevant for evaluating and displaying a variable or expression. As a result, we are now able to successfully debug the Unreal engine process and contain it within 3GB of virtual memory and 1.8GB of private working set. Previously in VS 2015 when debugging the Unreal engine process, we would run out-of-memory. Clearly this is an improvement over the previous release, but we’re not done yet. We will be continuing to drive down memory usage in native debugging scenarios during the rest of VS “15” development.

Wrap Up

As always, we welcome your feedback and we would love to learn from your experiences as you try out these features. Do let us know how these improvements scale for your C++ code base.
If you run into any problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option, either from the installer or the Visual Studio IDE itself. You can also email us your query or feedback if you choose to interact with us directly! For new feature suggestions, let us know through User Voice.

Jim Springfield, Principal Architect, Visual C++ team. Jim is passionate and guru about all things C++ and is actively involved in redesigning of the compiler frontend, language service engine, libraries and more. Jim is also the author of popular C++ libraries MFC, and ATL and his most recent work also involves development of the initial cross-platform C++ language service experience for upcoming editor Visual Studio Code.

Ankit Asthana, Senior Program Manager, Visual C++ team. Ankit’s focus area is cross-platform mobile development along with native code generation tools. Ankit is also knowledgeable in compilers, distributed computing and server side development. He has in the past worked for IBM and Oracle Canada as a developer building Java 7 (hotspot) optimization and telecommunication products. Ankit back in 2008 also published a book on C++ titled ‘C++ for Beginners to Masters’ which sold over a few thousand copies.