Finding Bugs with AddressSanitizer: Patterns from Open Source Projects

Kevin Cadieux May 10, 2021 May 10, 2021 05/10/21

AddressSanitizer (ASan) was officially released in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9. We recently used this feature to find and fix a bug in the MSVC compiler itself. To further validate the usefulness of our ASan implementation, we also used it on a collection of widely used open source projects where it found bugs in Boost, Azure IoT C SDK, ...

Faster C++ builds, simplified: a new metric for time

Kevin Cadieux October 12, 2020 Oct 12, 2020 10/12/20

C++ Build Insights is a collection of tools and APIs that can help you gain a deeper understanding of your build times. Today, we’d like to teach you about a special metric offered in this toolkit: the wall clock time responsibility (WCTR). It can be used to estimate how much time is really spent by each activity in your build, even in the ...

Improving code generation time with C++ Build Insights

Kevin Cadieux July 21, 2020 Jul 21, 2020 07/21/20

Code generation time is a significant contributor to total build time for optimized builds. During this step of the compilation process, source code is passed through several algorithms that transform your program into an optimized version that can be executed more efficiently. In general, the optimization of a C++ function happens quickly and...

Profiling template metaprograms with C++ Build Insights

Kevin Cadieux May 28, 2020 May 28, 2020 05/28/20

The use of templates in C++ programs can sometimes lead to longer builds. C++ Build Insights puts tools at your disposal for analyzing template usage patterns and their associated impact on build time. In this article, we show you how to use the vcperf analysis tool and the C++ Build Insights SDK to understand and fix problematic template ...

Faster builds with PCH suggestions from C++ Build Insights

Kevin Cadieux May 8, 2020 May 8, 2020 05/8/20

The creation of a precompiled header (PCH) is a proven strategy for improving build times. A PCH eliminates the need to repeatedly parse a frequently included header by processing it only once at the beginning of a build. The selection of headers to precompile has traditionally been viewed as a guessing game, but not anymore! In this article, ...

Finding build bottlenecks with C++ Build Insights

Kevin Cadieux April 22, 2020 Apr 22, 2020 04/22/20

C++ Build Insights offers more than one way to investigate your C++ build times. In this article, we discuss two methods that you can use to identify bottlenecks in your builds: manually by using the vcperf analysis tool, or programmatically with the C++ Build Insights SDK. We present a case study that shows how to use these tools to speed up ...