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Chromium Being Ported To VC++, Scrubbed of Compiler Bugs

jones_supa writes: Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than the Chromium web browser. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of WebKit, there are over a hundred other open-source projects which Chromium incorporates by reference, totaling more than 48,000 C/C++ files and 40,000 header files. As of March 11th, Chromium has switched to Visual C++ 2015, and it doesn't look like it's looking back. The tracking bug for this effort currently has over 330 comments on it, with contributions from dozens of developers. Bruce Dawson has written an interesting showcase of some VC++ compiler bugs that the process has uncovered. His job was to investigate them, come up with a minimal reproduce case, and report them to Microsoft. The Google and Microsoft teams get praise for an excellent symbiotic relationship, and the compiler bugs have been fixed quickly by the Visual Studio team.

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:From what to VC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    As near as I can tell they switched the Windows build from VC++ old version to VC++ new version. Because:

    - Improved C++11/14 support
    - Security improvements
    - Some /analyze checked rolled into main compile
    - Possibly some improved support for "cloud" builds

  2. Re:Odd choice of tools by jszpilewski · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just their principal Windows build environment changed in March 2016 from VS 2013 (still supported) to VS 2015. This is no news... really.

  3. Re:And all so they can sell you to advertisers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    >"As of March 11th, Chromium has switched to Visual C++ 2015..."

    This should have been written as:
    "As of March 11th, WINDOWS Chromium build has switched supported compilers FROM Visual C++ 2013 TO Visual C++ 2015 ..."

    This has nothing to do with OSX or linux builds and is not that much important news.