"Dev17"? Stupid question

[DomiOh]

Hello,

that might be a stupid question, but what is "Dev17" Preview 1?

Greetings.

[CaseyCarter]

Yes! Another exciting, "What is the deal with your versioning story?" question!

Microsoft internally refers to each major Visual Studio release as DevX, where X is a sequential integer value (except for skipping from 12 to 14). Basically, it's the version number that release would have if we had continued with the VC6 versioning scheme instead of switching to versioning by year. Visual Studio 2019 is Dev16, so Dev17 will be the next major release.

[miscco]

I am super terrified by the C++20 / C++23 switch.

Looking at the desire to redesign certain containers this dual track wil become a maintenance hell (Except the vNext branch moves to its own files somehow)

[StephanTLavavej]

@jovibor We're very familiar with the downsides of ABI compatibility, as it has prevented us from fixing major things (which is why we're going to have vNext). I was around back when we broke ABI every major version (the full release cycles of VS 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2015) and it was glorious for implementers - we got to fix tons of stuff and rip out tons of dead code. However, customers found this hard to keep up with - regardless of how in an ideal world, everyone should be able to rebuild everything from source on demand. This led to delayed upgrades and ultimately harmed progress (having a really cool new major version doesn't do any good if most people are still stuck on VS 2010 or whatever). Maintaining compatibility since VS 2015 has been very successful - but it is clear that we do need to break ABI from time to time. My hope is that we'll be able to establish a semi-predictable pattern, offering stability for multiple releases/5+ years, but establishing the expectation that ABI breaks and migration will be periodically necessary.

@MikeGitb Yes, we'll definitely think about naming to mitigate confusion as much as possible. I hope that nobody refers to "the C++23 ABI" since that will be confusing - vNext will certainly support C++20 and C++23 as distinct modes, and is virtually certain to support C++17. (I am holding out hope that we may be able to drop C++14 mode, and I want a pony and a unicorn. Perhaps I will get one.)

@miscco The idea of a clean switchover is that there will be no maintenance of the old version - only critical fixes (much as we already do today for the VS 2015 and VS 2017 toolsets, which are still supported but not with active development). It's not certain, but I expect that GitHub's history will remain linear, and we'll simply say that main is a vNext branch when the switchover happens. Internally, we'll have separate branches for the "v19" compatible and vNext toolsets, but the old branch will be rarely changed. This is precisely because we tried to simultaneously develop two branches for "classic vNext" 3 years ago and it became unmaintainable.

[MikeGitb]

and I want a pony and a unicorn. Perhaps I will get one.)

🐴🦄 (sorry couldn't resist).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this and lets hope for the best.

[MikeGitb]

Any news on vnext?

[StephanTLavavej]

No vNext news, sorry.