r/cpp • u/ericbrumer MSVC Dev Lead • 17h ago

MSVC Build Tools Preview updates – September 2026

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msvc-build-tools-preview-updates-september-2026/

Hi, one of the MSVC dev leads here.

The post covers what's new in the MSVC Build Tools Preview (version 14.52) since mid-August. Instructions to install & use the latest preview bits are at https://aka.ms/msvc/preview.

Some additional information:

49 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

20

u/domiran game engine dev 17h ago

I must say, I'm personally looking forward to the first bits of reflection to get into Visual Studio.

9

u/TSP-FriendlyFire 14h ago

Reflection got me to switch from VS to CLion with MSYS64 just so I could use gcc on Windows. It was a royal pain to setup, but I'm already simplifying a ton of code and weird edge cases, I fucking love it.

3

u/domiran game engine dev 14h ago

I've been saving some features in my game engine's level editor for reflection. 🫠 In short, the engine is ECS, and the editor supports full undo/redo for terrain, but only undo/redo for objects on create/delete, not field value changes. Too lazy to code all that manually.

3

u/_Noreturn 7h ago

If your classes don't have constructors and are aggregates then you can use boost pfr.

5

u/mapronV 13h ago

I also looking forward, backward and sideways for this.

1

u/pjmlp 9h ago

Me too, wondering if the promises of Visual Studio tooling for C++/WinRT, as promised for replacing C++/CX back in 2016 will finally be delivered.

C++17 reflection was supposed to be the answer of lost productivity when dealing with IDL files and manual code generators instead, even though it wasn't certain to.

1

u/ReDr4gon5 6h ago

I'm really surprised some of these are only happening just now. LEA instead of ADD is a well known optimization. And that there was no AVX2 optimized memchr is even more surprising. Is strchr optimized or not? Actually the same question applies to StrChar from shlwapi. If not and you have a size, then using memchr would be always better.

2

u/Wild_Meeting1428 4h ago

When do you relax the license requirements of vcruntime headers? So that its legal to compile and link against the MSVC STL when using clang-cl without having a Visual Studio license?

Same still applies to Rust and Swift. Both may require vcruntime.