Tag Archives: VC++

Delete an inline function, save 794 kB

Posted on January 22, 2017 by brucedawson

In the previous episode of “Simple Changes to Shrink Chrome” I discussed how deleting ‘const’ from a few key locations could lead to dramatic size savings, due to a VC++ compiler quirk. In this episode I’ll show how deleting an … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Add a const here, delete a const there…

Posted on January 8, 2017 by brucedawson

Update, February 2019: Two years later the VC++ bug I reported here still exists, even in VS 2019 preview. However Chromium no longer builds with VC++ so I’m reverting the changes where I deleted const in order to make some … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

Programming is Puzzles

Posted on July 27, 2015 by brucedawson

When I’m describing what I do for a living to non-programmers I sometimes say that I solve puzzles. I solve fascinating puzzles that are different every day, and there’s no answer key, and very often nobody else knows the solution. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Make VC++ Compiles Fast Through Parallel Compilation

Posted on March 22, 2014 by brucedawson

The free lunch is over and our CPUs are not getting any faster so if you want faster builds then you have to do parallel builds. Visual Studio supports parallel compilation but it is poorly understood and often not even … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Visual Studio, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 50 Comments

How to Report a VC++ Code-Gen Bug

Posted on October 14, 2013 by brucedawson

My coworkers recently found a bug in the x64 code generated by Visual C++. This bug exists in VC++ 2010 to VC++ 2013 RC. We put in a workaround (the traditional one of disabling optimizations for the afflicted function) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Debugging Optimized Code–New in Visual Studio 2012

Posted on September 11, 2013 by brucedawson

For years (decades?) one of the most requested features in Visual C++ has been better support for debugging optimized code. Visual Studio’s debug information is so limited that in a program that consists just of main(argc, argv) the VS debugger … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Symbols | Tagged , , , , , | 35 Comments

Two Years (and Thousands of Bugs) of Static Analysis

Posted on June 24, 2013 by brucedawson

I’ve been running static code analysis on four large code bases for over two years now. After the initial work of looking through all of the warnings and fixing the serious bugs I put the projects into code analysis maintenance … Continue reading →

Posted in Code analysis, Code Reliability, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , | 22 Comments

Another Bug in Your Bug (Finder): __offsetof

Posted on November 28, 2012 by brucedawson

Last month I posted about a crashing bug in Visual Studio 2012’s static code analysis feature.  The irony was delicious. Yesterday I found another bug in the same feature. This one isn’t quite as dramatic, but I found it amusing, … Continue reading →

Posted in Code analysis, Code Reliability, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Visual C++ Debug Builds–”Fast Checks” Cause 5x Slowdowns

Posted on July 22, 2011 by brucedawson

Introduction Visual Studio’s default Debug builds run painfully slowly. With one small change to your compile settings you may find that your Debug builds run up to five times faster. Update: the situation with Visual C++ 2013 is fundamentally unchanged. … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, Visual Studio, xperf | Tagged , | 19 Comments