The same thing could be described as a disincentive for supporting more-recent C++, and yet Microsoft is implementing those features at a pace which is unusually fast (for VC). I'm sure the real issue is much more prosaic: it costs money to implement, and it's not something that most of VC's customers are asking for. The expense here probably isn't in changing the compiler itself; it's in the implementation of the test suites. And while there may be open source test suites available under an acceptable license, the company's willingness to make use of outside source is changing at a glacially-slow pace -- particularly for core products.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft and know some people on the C++ compiler team. These comments are purely speculative on my part.
I don't think there's a disincentive on the C++ side - the best Windows apps use C++ so improving C++ helps make Windows a strong platform. The article also points out many of the most missed features of C99 are straightforward, and hopefully the tests would be too.
Comments
The same thing could be described as a disincentive for supporting more-recent C++, and yet Microsoft is implementing those features at a pace which is unusually fast (for VC). I'm sure the real issue is much more prosaic: it costs money to implement, and it's not something that most of VC's customers are asking for. The expense here probably isn't in changing the compiler itself; it's in the implementation of the test suites. And while there may be open source test suites available under an acceptable license, the company's willingness to make use of outside source is changing at a glacially-slow pace -- particularly for core products.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft and know some people on the C++ compiler team. These comments are purely speculative on my part.
I don't think there's a disincentive on the C++ side - the best Windows apps use C++ so improving C++ helps make Windows a strong platform. The article also points out many of the most missed features of C99 are straightforward, and hopefully the tests would be too.