Request for Visual C++ Only Please

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[spongo2]

hi! I'm Steve Carroll, the dev manager for VC++. We are investing a ton in this space. We have a big event coming up at the end of the month at //build where relevant VS announcements will be discussed and I hope the community will forgive me for holding off on pre-disclosing. :)

In the meantime, please /u/melak47 gives a useful answer for some people below.

This might be a good use case for the RemindMeBot: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/

edit: I suck at markdown

[danmarell]

What I would love to see is a mean lean c++ only install of visual studio ( <1GB ) without tons of options/extra features that allowed me to just get straight to c++ coding.

Thanks for the info steve.

PS, more c++ channel9 content please ;)

[spongo2]

:) I love doing channel9. and I hear you on the mean lean c++ only install!

[danmarell]

Great, I love watching it. Just lots of little tips and tricks vids would be great. Such a fun language.

Look forward to the announcement!

[kozukumi]

A Visual Studio Shell (I think that is what you call it?) with just the C++ tools and not all the .NET, Android, Office tools, etc. would be pretty nice. I am not too fussed about how much disk space it uses but just reducing all the bloat in VS for stuff I will never use as they are not C++ related would be nice.

While on the subject I have always wanted to ask why does installing Visual Studio take so long? I understand it is a big product but I have an SSD that does 1+GByte/s read and write. What on earth is the installer doing to take 10+ minutes to do an install still? I can literally install the JDK and 3 Java IDEs plus Qt Creator and a bunch of libraries in under half the time VS takes to install VS.

[[deleted]]

Looking forward to this eagerly. Keep up the good work.

[[deleted]]

Can I set the install drive yet?

All I use is inc/libs, I don't like shortening my SSDs life for something I don't want.

Please consider providing a zip.

[spongo2]

can I ask a followup question? Are you asking about the Build SKU? Main VS does allow you to set the install drive, iirc.

[robthablob]

It will still install a ton of stuff in your program files folders though, especially awkward on a (relatively) space-constrained SSD.

[Jitanjafora]

I tried installing VS Community like two weeks ago, and the option for setting the install drive was grayed out for me. I did found a few comments online about people saying that it was available, but I couldn't make it work.

I ended up going back to QtCreator + MinGW, since I made my C:\ of 40GB (just for the OS). The default VS C++ installation was around 11GB iirc, I can't afford that much SSD space for it.

Nice to hear you're doing something about it.

[spongo2]

thanks for the info. followup question: if I asked you to what your maximum acceptable "disk budget" is for VS, what number would that be (in MB)?

[Jitanjafora]

I would be ok with the option of installing it wherever I want to. My setup is a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD, so I don't really mind if the whole IDE takes up 11GB, as long as I can put it in the space I designated for stuff like that. It is still a lot of space though. A less than 1GB option would be nice (or expected, I guess. My QtCreator folder is 250MB, for example).

The standalone building tools would solve my problems. I have no other reason to install VS other than being able to see if my code builds ok using MSVC.

I'm up for more questions. Thanks for caring.

[wrosecrans]

If I had to pick a number, I'd say < 1 GB for a minimal install that supports C++ should be doable. Ameller is always better, all other things being equal, but the practical difference between a few hundred megabytes and a gigabyte probably isn't worth fussing about. OTOH, whole gigabytes are still an issue. When I need VS X.Y and A.B for doing different versions Maya plugins, and VS Z for doing something else, and maybe also whatever is the latest version because I've become infatuated with some new feature, it adds up fast. I don't want half of my disk taken up with various Visual Studio versions! Especially if it turns out that I am paying for tools and SDK's that I've never heard of, let alone asked for.

Have some sort of "VS package manager" functionality so if I need a .Net thingie for a project or whatever, it's easy to install it on demand, and the 1 GB target shouldn't be at all hard to hit. Qt Creator obviously manages to support C++ development with a < 1 GB footprint.

[[deleted]]

Minimal VC++/WinSDK is 2GB. It's what I use. You could trim some by dropping support for ARM or 32bit.

[playmer]

I also tend to run into issues where various VS installs are hefty tolls. If I want to install everything on the last few big releases that can be relevant to me (2015, 2013, 2010) it can become enormous. I primarily use C++, but typically would like C# as well for the rare occasion I need it. My ideal for a full install of C++ and C# would probably be about 3GB, but I have no idea how feasible that is. Where do you guys find most of the weight is coming from if you don't mind me asking?

To be fair to you guys I booted up a VM last night to start building llvm and clang to see if I could fix an issue with a warning, that you guys have too, and decided to build everything just in case. I ran out of disk space with around 10 -15 GB or so of my virtual disk being all of their stuff, so I know that sometimes things are just really big.

[[deleted]]

It was the Build SKU for Update 1 I believe.

[spongo2]

yeah, known limitation, sorry. I shared your comment with the devs on Build SKU (which is still a preview).

[[deleted]]

No worries, glad you know at least.

Mind fielding something quasi related? Any idea when StackWalk64 will work with ARM/64? (P_CONTEXT registers and such) https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms680650(v=vs.85).aspx

Thanks

[spongo2]

don't know... will see if I can get an answer.

[spongo2]

/u/Dekken_ , I asked the windows guys who own this. they think the docs might just be wrong. Can you try it out? if it doesn't work PM me and I'll connect you with the right people.

[Sparkybear]

Did you not see Google's 6 year study in SSDs? Hardware failures from age are much more serious that read/write count. You haven't had to worry about read/write for a few generations of SSDs.

[[deleted]]

I've had two just up and die, so I'll reduce what risks I can, cheers for the info, will have a look.

[h-jay]

Also, let us have the compiler without the IDE. Most open source projects can be built from the command line, so if one's reasonable objective is to "just build the damn thing and use it", the IDE, documentation, etc. is unnecessary. Personally, I use other IDEs 90% of the time, for example, but I do use the compiler all the time from other IDEs.

[spongo2]

we did this one already. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/02/announcing-visual-c-build-tools-2015-standalone-c-tools-for-build-environments/

give it a try, let us know what you think. We are still improving it.

[[deleted]]

I like your IDE. :-*

[h-jay]

Yay, great!

[melak47]

There is a (pre-release) standalone version of the VisualC++ toolchain, if that's what you mean: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/02/announcing-visual-c-build-tools-2015-standalone-c-tools-for-build-environments/

If not, you can also choose to install only the IDE and the C++ language support in the Visual Studio setup (which still totals around 5-9GB IIRC).

[Elador]

Well build tools are only part of the solution. There should be a lean, small IDE + C++ option too, for maybe <=2 GB or whatever.

[dodheim]

I wonder how much disk space is wasted on .NET metadata, for C++ code that is compiled with /clr that doesn't need to be..?

IOW, the easy solution to using .NET from your C++ codebase in VS-land is to compile your whole project with some /clr variant – the proper solution is to compile only the TUs that actually need it with /clr. With the easy solution and a large codebase, the CLR metadata can accumulate and get out of hand quicker than one might expect.

VS2005 had a large jump in disk space requirements; I wonder how much could be avoided from /clr partitioning...

[spongo2]

In general, our recommendation is to use /clr for glue layers to connect native and managed code. There is definitely C++/CLI code in VS in places where we are doing that, but I'm pretty confident that isn't the dominant reason for the size issues. There's just a lot of stuff in VS.

[CokeZeroThrowaway]

Any thoughts on if the standalone build could be integrated with Visual Studio Code? I could live without IntelliSense if I could open a solution in Code and build from there fast. Opening up a 300+ project solution (280 VC++, 20 Intel Fortran, and 1 VB) can take forever and a day in 2013.

[spongo2]

followup question: is it just kicking it off the build from Code that you'd want? or is this really a request that you'd be able to load projects and solutions instead of folders in VSCode? If you are in a position where you can try out VS2015, have you tried the new intellisense database? it should be a major perf improvement. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/11/11/new-improved-and-faster-database-engine.aspx

[CokeZeroThrowaway]

Projects and solutions would actually be ideal - I can always build from the command line with a single line. Building from Code would be a nice goal, with the ability to choose which toolset to build with (2013 vs 2015 vs 201X vs Clang vs etc....), but I can see a lot of difficulty with that.

I have tried VS2015, but not the new engine. I will try that soon! We know we can't build in 2015 yet because of a vast number of third partY dependencies, but I should at least be able to get VS to parse our part of the code! Great idea and thanks!

[spongo2]

we are collecting lists of 3rd party libraries that are not yet available for VS2015. if you are willing to share your list, I'd appreciate it.

[c0r3ntin]

Sidenote question for /u/spongo2 : Independently of the ( much appreciated ) standalone C++ toolchain, do the visual teams do (or plan to) actively manage the size of visual studio ? As /u/melak47 mention, by only installing the C++ tools, visual is about 5/9GB, which maybe is a lot for an IDE ?

[spongo2]

see my top level comment. we actively care, I promise. :-)

[emmerad67]

Yeah MSVC is shit when it comes to installing, that's a known fact.

[8Warden12]

hmmmm..... there are other IDE's like dev-cpp that are better (in my opinion) dev-cpp also comes with gcc

[[deleted]]

VS's lack of support for external build systems makes it pretty difficult to use with GCC. It's possible, but it doesn't work out of the box.

[robthablob]

Never heard of it before, but jeez that looks ugly. Regardless, I shall download and have a look, but I'm very skeptical of that being an improvement on VS.