Intel C++ Compiler 12??

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been officially released for 3 months now (to the day), and to be pedantic, it has also been available in beta form since October 2008. Its bugs not withstanding, Visual Studio 2010 been a pretty successful hit. Besides the huge improvements to the .NET language and platform, big on the list of features for C++ developers is basic support for C++0x (the next standard version of C++, with lots of new & revolutionary features) and plenty of IDE enhancements. Intel’s C++ Compiler is the industry-standard with regards to performance and optimizations, still doesn’t support Visual Studio 2010 or C++0x.

As numerous postings on the Intel forums indicate, a plethora of users are in pressing need of an update to the Intel C++ Compiler. Questions on the matter are brushed-off, with short and rather-useless replies such as:

“This question has been discussed several times recently. The first such integration would come in a beta version of icc 12.0, which hasn’t yet been announced.”

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The Un-Improvements to “Find All References” in Visual Studio 2010

A November 2009 post on the Visual C++ Team Blog by Raman Sharma delved into the improvements Visual Studio 2010 was purported to have made to the “Find All References” feature of Visual Studio. This feature is a must-have for any developer in almost any language. As a project grows in size and complexity, it becomes a real chore to remember and locate exactly where a particular variable was defined – which is something that’s quite useful to know.

According to the VC++ blog post, VS2010 now uses a “speed-mode” by default to locate these references. It’s a bit less accurate in that it generates a lot of false positives, searching by name rather than by usage, but that this reduced accuracy comes with greater speed. And the option remains to further filter out results by having the compiler and the intellisense databases resolve the actual results and determine whether or not they indeed reference the search term.

Except that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In truth, that’s not what happens:

1) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” of Find All References is slower than it was in Visual Studio 2005.

2) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” not only generates extraneous false positives, it also fails to show items that do match the search term.

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