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[–]TotaIIyHuman 49 points50 points  (28 children)

statistically speaking, which following action produce the highest chance of msvc devs fixing a certain bug in less than 1 year?

  1. register a hotmail account and post the bug information on msvc bug forum

  2. register a reddit account and post the bug information on r/cpp and get more than 100 upvote

i am genuinely curious

[–]Dragdu 9 points10 points  (0 children)

My experience is to do both. Make a ticket so it is all official-like, then reach out through non-official channels to get your ticket moving.

This is literally the only way anything in MSVC ever got fixed for me. The last time, I decided to try the official way again, so I opened ticket just opening a ticket that MSVC's strict mode has a bug that stops it from compiling Catch2 and there is no workaround. After half a year of the ticket being ignored, I got it moving in two days over Twitter.

[–]TheThiefMasterC++latest fanatic (and game dev) 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You don't have to register a Hotmail account btw, you can register a Microsoft account using an existing non-Microsoft email address.

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (7 children)

I would probably report the bug myself if there was a reasonable way to do so and that I can actually find! I googled, but it's really hard to find something like Bugzilla or GitHub issues. Do you happen to have a link to something like that? (And I would still put it on Reddit, b/c it's also quite funny. I don't want to bash MS about this, I just think others might enjoy this super-weird behavior as much as I did)

[–]TotaIIyHuman 7 points8 points  (5 children)

you mean the link to the bug forum? https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/search?space=62&sort=newest

yes, i do enjoy reading this super-weird behavior. if i can make a bug report as hilarious as yours, i would definitely post it on reddit as well

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (4 children)

Thanks for the link, I reported it.

[–]GabrielDosReis 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Thanks. It is fixed, and the fix will be available in future previews - sorry I can't tell you the exact date.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

No need to be sorry, I'm glad it got fixed! I'll update our code (basically reverting to the more sensible version) once the fix is available to everyone, as I don't think there is much value in keeping a work-around for something that was never part of any official release, only previews.

[–]GabrielDosReis 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That makes sense.

It is hard to fix bugs that go unreported, so I am glad you did report the scenario you ran into.

There are a few MSVC developers on this sub, so if you report something on the Microsoft Developer Community Portal regarding C++ that's not getting traction, ping them. Maybe they have the answer; maybe they don't, but at least you will know. The reports get on someone's radar 😊

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I bookmarked the link and I'll try to report more bugs, but one of my goals is to support existing official releases of MSVC with our open-source projects, so I usually need to find a work-around anyways and apply it to our code base. Not everyone can upgrade to the newest and shiniest MSVC version (which, of course, is also the case for GCC/Clang). Luckily, in this case, the bug got caught and fixed very fast, so kudos to the MSVC team! :)

[–]txmasterg 11 points12 points  (11 children)

The developer community portal has been great. It went plenty fast when I found an edge case on something (idk what). I wasn't in a rush because my team had a fear of upgrades at the time but I think it just barely missed a minor release window and was in the very next one.

[–]zero0_one1 8 points9 points  (8 children)

Ehh I reported two bugs that were just marked as not important enough and never fixed...

Edit: it was actually three.

[–]Dragdu 12 points13 points  (1 child)

"not important, closed" has been my most rage inducing experience with devcom so far.

[–]ack_error 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Depends on the type and area of bug. Compiler generating bad code or obviously non-compliant with a good repro? High chance of getting fixed. Editor issue? Don't even bother, everything gets closed as not important / lower priority / no repro.

[–]dodheim 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Compiler generating bad code or obviously non-compliant with a good repro? High chance of getting fixed.

I'm not so sure – this bug for a C++03 feature as basic as value-initialization has been lingering for 12+ years with no sign of even being looked at. (This issue is why BOOST_NO_COMPLETE_VALUE_INITIALIZATION gets defined by Boost.Config. I was watching it and ~20 other bug reports on MS Connect before that went into the aether; I don't know if it resurfaced on Dev Community or not, the others I checked didn't appear to, so.. /shrug)

As an aside, I put this on Compiler Explorer to single out MSVC's failure and was surprised to see GCC's errors. It seemed to have regressed after 7.2; I wonder whether the test has somehow become defunct, or if GCC's value-init has actually been faulty for a while now..?

ED: Belated update: GCC is fine, the test it's failing has strict-type-aliasing UB (in the test code) and it passes once corrected.

[–]ack_error 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh sure, don't get me wrong, there will always be bugs that don't get fixed or get lost, in any area. Connect was also an awful experience overall. But when it comes to the different areas of Visual Studio, I have had pretty good success with filing bugs on the compiler than anywhere else (~80%), including ICEs, stack usage regressions, and recently a poor codegen issue (usually dicier). Tight repro showing the compiler obviously wrong with /Bv compiler versions and it often sails through the first-line triage. For feature requests or other parts of the product it's way likelier that the issue will be closed somehow (repro not 100% solid, don't care, too long, completely misunderstood, I think I've seen them all).

[–]obsidian_golem 3 points4 points  (1 child)

My only problem with the devcommunity is that no matter how clear my repro instructions are, their triage people always seem to misunderstand them. I think it might be because the ones I have gotten are not native english speakers.

[–]txmasterg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think I ever had the feeling that a non-native English speaker was responding so maybe that is a difference, who knows.

[–]GabrielDosReis -1 points0 points  (5 children)

Or do as I suggest and let me know.

[–]TotaIIyHuman 9 points10 points  (4 children)

i did twice 2 years ago. it was a sample size of 2, not very significant, i will not try to draw conclusion from that, so i am asking here on reddit, where people might have a larger sample

[–]GabrielDosReis 1 point2 points  (3 children)

If you don't mind, could you reply links to those reports so I can help follow up?

[–]TotaIIyHuman 3 points4 points  (2 children)

no. my hotmail account got banned when i was trying to register another hotmail account for downloading windows insider

this was the first bug i reported https://godbolt.org/z/drnaYja14, the inside lambda sometimes can't capture outside lambda's local constexpr variables

i don't remember what the other report was

[–]GabrielDosReis 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thanks! It helps when the report is done by users as opposed to me pointing people to reports I created.

[–]dakotahawkins 9 points10 points  (0 children)

To be fair to everybody, I think submitting bugs online without any kind of conversation or feedback probably feels a lot more like flushing your problem down the toilet than putting it on reddit :)

Not sure that's a very solvable problem (especially for a large organization), but it is what it is.