Even though Visual C++ is very popular on Windows, the compiler has received some criticism about things like its standards conformance and code generation. It has been getting better, though, especially since the Visual C++ 2015 lifecycle. Microsoft has kept up with C++17 and C++20 standards conformance, and their compiler team adds new optimizations with each minor release. They are even competitive with previews of unreleased features, such as C++20 modules.
Microsoft has published a blog post highlighting some key additions over the last year. One interesting change in Visual C++ 2019 16.6 is the pair of attributes, [[likely]] and [[unlikely]]. For a while, C++ compilers have provided vendor-specific hints to guide CPU branch prediction. The idea is to avoid the CPU accidentally traversing down an edge-case and having to flush its pipeline, which costs around 15 to 20 cycles on AMD Zen and Intel -Lake architectures. For context, this is around 10x cheaper than a main RAM read, and it is only 1/200,000,000th of a second at 4 GHz, but it can be a problem if you’re pushing a lot of data down that function. These attributes have been added to C++20, and Microsoft beat Clang to the punch (although GCC added it last year).
Microsoft has also open-sourced their C++ standard library at CppCon 2019. Their GitHub page highlights the improvements over there.
