There are real issues causing real problems which really should be fixed, very much including those related to standards compliance, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. The cure would be worse than the poison: Breaking existing codebases further, making it even harder to update legacy codebases to new toolsets, for an error made -- I'm guessing wildly here instead of verifying -- back in the VS6 era perhaps? That's a lot of code. What do we gain? We... make it slightly harder to accidentally write MSVC specific code. We already have a much, much better and more thorough tool for that: Compiling with a non MSVC compiler. I'd rather see the dev time put towards other issues.
As for not hitting C++11 standards compliance straight off the bat, they tried that for C++98 in VS6 and got burned by last minute changes. Yes, it'd be nice if they implemented everything correctly. The bug reports calling out problems with that compliance are very well and good. That said, they aren't billing themselves as feature-complete WRT C++11 yet, and I'd rather take this lackadaisical tempo than see yet another round of implementation mistakes which then need indefinite support.
Of course, this is probably colored by the fact that I don't get to use C++11 yet anyways -- out of the environments I'm currently stuck supporting, MSVC is at the bleeding edge of the curve.
Titling a submission "Visual C++ team's attitude to standards compliance" and pointing it at a bug report for some minor non-conforming behaviour tells us nothing useful about the msvc teams attitude to standards. Neither does the brief response from the team on that page. All it says is that there is an issue that they're not going to fix at the moment. Microsoft have a lot of customers, and those customers have a lot of code that they don't want to suddenly break without a good reason.
Do some work. Find or write a useful article investigating the c++ teams attitude to standards compliance and post a link to that. If it compared msvc to other compilers then I'd read it.
Here is a much, much more serious issue. Variable length arrays of C++ types. Totally not in the C++ standard anywhere. Accepted by g++ and clang++, even if I turn on all warnings, and use '-std=c++11', which is supposed to turn off extensions. I have to add -pedantic to finally get a warning.
Now, I'm not saying they should break this code, but this is a much, much, much more serious unlabelled breakage of the standard, which is never going to get fixed, and goes back to the start of g++ and clang++.
struct X {};
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{ X a[argc]; }http://isocpp.org/blog/2013/04/trip-report-iso-c-spring-2013...
That being said, you are correct that it would be good to see warnings in something other than just -pedantic for that.
(Of course, part of that is presumably that gcc's nonconformance is generally useful, as in this case...)
This is pretty standard type of issues for any ANSI/ISO language regardless of the vendor.
Oh boy the joys of doing C and C++ development across multiple OS in the late 90's with commercial compilers.
error: cannot call constructor ‘Thing::Thing’ directly [-fpermissive]
clang compiles the code without issuing an error.
"Use of a supplier's language extensions and non-standard-conforming features limits the portability of your code and can prevent you from choosing a new implementation supplier."
// Must allocate our own memory
Test *ptr = (Test *)malloc(sizeof(Test));
// Use placement new
new (ptr) Test;
// Must call the destructor ourselves
ptr->~Test();
// Must release the memory ourselves
free(ptr);