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http://www.artima.com/cppsource/top_cpp_software.html 1992-present. Visual C++ (VC++) has been at once one of the most important reasons for the success of C++ and one of the most potent forces retarding its progress. Notwithstanding Bjarne Stroustrup’s assertion that “nobody knows what most C++ developers do,2” I have little doubt that if you lined up every C++ developer on the planet and polled them for the compiler or compilers they use for production work, a majority would mention VC++. For that reason alone, Visual C++ has been and continues to be important to C++. Furthermore, the flagship Microsoft products (e.g, operating systems and Microsoft Office applications) are written entirely or primarily in C++ and are compiled with the Visual C++ compiler. This, too, makes VC++ important in the world of C++. The company’s reliance on C++ has led them to develop tools and APIs to support its use, and that has motivated many Windows developers to adopt the language. By the late 1990s, C++ was known to many (and to my shock and dismay) as “the Microsoft language.”3 Visual C++ remains a dominating presence on the C++ landscape. For legions of programmers, Visual C++ is C++. Unfortunately, there were many years during which Microsoft’s implementation fell far short of the standard. Up until 1998, this wasn’t a problem, because there wasn’t any standard to adhere to, and compilers from other vendors had their own share of issues. However, Visual C++ 6 (VC6) was released in 1998, nearly a year after the C++ standard had been completed. VC6’s standards-conformance was less than exemplary, but at the time, that was not a serious problem, because relatively few programmers were using the “new” features of standard C++. What made it a serious problem was that VC6 remained the current Microsoft release until 2002 (when VC7 was released), and even then the compiler itself went largely unchanged. Rather, the primary improvement in standards conformance came in the form of an upgraded library (e.g., a more standards-conformant implementations of the STL), something many of us felt should have been done as a patch release years earlier. The 2003 release of Visual C++ (VC7.1) finally resolved most issues of standards conformance, but during the six years between VC6 and VC7.1, cross-platform developers using VC++ had to expend enormous effort to work around VC++’s failure to support things like partial template specialization, typically through conditional compilation (i.e., fragmented code bases). Furthermore, many developers continue to use VC6 even today, and those developers continue to be beholden to the decision the Visual C++ team made to largely ignore standards conformance for that release. (For such developers, for example, new doesn’t throw an exception if memory is exhausted, it returns the null pointer.) Since 2003, VC++ hasn’t had what I consider to be significant problems with standards conformance, and I’m convinced that the current leadership takes standards conformance seriously. Still, because I frequently work with developers whose lives (or at least whose code bases) were made unnecessarily difficult for the six-year span from 1998 through 2003, I’ve decided that I’m justified in harboring a grudge against Microsoft into 2008—six years from the time they released a “real” C++ compiler.

[Tech History Know-how] Visual C++ by Microsoft