Difference between Visual C++ 2008 and 2005

Question

I couldn't find any useful information on Microsoft's site, so here is the question: has the compiler in Visual C++ 2008 been improved significantly since the 2005 version? I'm especially looking for better optimization.

Answer 1

Straight from the horses mouth....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384632.aspx

Answer 2

Somasegar has some notes in this blog post. Mainly about incremental build improvements and multi core improvements.

Answer 3

According to one of our senior developers VS2008 features extended support for multicore compilation ( file-wise instead of project-wise I'm told ), so there might be a reasonable performance optimization for your project.

Answer 4

Have you looked here, here or here ?

If yes, and no information was there you could start by checking first the compiler version (cl.exe) the linker version(link.exe) and then make some performance (optimization tests) and see who is the winner.

Usually a newer version of cl.exe will be better. Not the same thing can be mentioned about the UserInterface of Visual Studio (at least from my experience).

Answer 5

In my experience, compiler optimizations rarely improve more than a few percent between versions at most; if you really need more performance, that few percent just isn't going to cut it--you're going to have to get down and dirty in the code if you want more.

Remember, compilers are extremely dumb, and can usually be outwitted by a smart programmer; the only question is whether its worth your time and effort to do so. If you have a single core function that makes up 90% of your CPU time, it might definitely be so. If runtime is spread equally over ten thousand lines of code, probably not.

Of course, if your speed problem is due to slow algorithms, no compiler can save you.