I appreciate Microsoft's renewed commitment to native code but I'm rather disappointed at the limited C++11 support in the upcoming Visual Studio 2012 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2011/09/12/10209291.a... especially when compared with gcc and clang.
Yep, those omissions are painful. I am not sure how the decision making process goes but if you look at the MS link vs the GCC one you will note that GCC has done basically nothing in the concurrency space in C++11, whereas MS will have implemented a number of items there. Clang is in the same boat there in terms of basically no work on the concurrency area.
As a member of the Visual Studio team (though I work on the IDE shell area, not the C++ compiler) I can say that the C++ team is a LOT smaller than many people seem to imagine. I think people imagine that VS is one giant team, it is really lots and lots of small-ish teams. The STL work is done by Dinkumware and I think there is one (maybe two) MS assets actually helping out there. One of the folks talking at Going Native (Stephan Lavavej) is said person, and he is awesome. The compiler work is split between a front-end and back-end team and obviously some pieces require coordinated effort from both teams to implement, on top of other non-standard requests they have to field. I personally would like them to focus 100% effort on purely standards only stuff until they get more 'caught up', but I don't run things :)
All of this takes nothing away from GCC and Clang, they are both awesome products developed over a long period of time by lots of accomplished compiler devs. MS has recently(-ish) spent more resources focusing on native development again after a long period of promoting basically all managed (or primarily managed), I think that is a good thing, balance is healthy.
> I'm rather disappointed at the limited C++11 support in the upcoming Visual Studio 2012
As a C user who's been waiting 12 years for MSVC to implement C99, I had to sardonically laugh when I read this. They don't even let you declare variables in the middle of a block!
I wasn't disputing that, I was just pointing out that OP was complaining about lack of C++11 support in Visual Studio compared to gcc and clang, but this is even more unfortunate considering the Visual Studio team has indicated that they prioritize C++11 support above other things.
Visual Studio is still on a pretty long ship cycle (2-3 years), which makes it hard for them to pick up on new stuff like this. Perhaps they'll add more support in the SP1, if we're lucky.
gcc: http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html
clang: http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html
To pick a few examples, range-based for, variadic templates, and non-static data member initializers are huge improvements to the language.