Is Microsoft Visual C++ tied to windows platform?

Question

I want to learn C++ and I want to know if using Microsoft VC++ will tie me to Windows. I specially need my project to also run on Mac. My projects are all Class libraries and have no dependency to UI. They are just calculations or file/network IO.

I really like working in Visual Studio and Microsoft way overall. So my priority is to go VC++ unless it makes painful to build cross platform apps for Windows and Mac. I mean at the compiler, libraries and language level. I don't want my parallel app to fall apart on certain platforms.

Answer 1

I personnaly use Visual Studio to build my code on Windows and other compilers to build the same code on other platforms (Mac, Linux, Android...).

To be sure you don't get locked with Windows, make sure (at least, it's not exhaustive):

• You don't use any win32 API (prefer cross plateforme libraries like boost for instance for network, file system access...)
• You don't use 3rd party libraries only available for Windows
• Don't use CString, or anyother Microsoft class. Prefer STL.
• Be careful with file system case sensitiveness too! ( #include "Foo.h" while file is "foo.h" on disk will work on PC, not under Mac/Linux). Prefer naming ALL your files in lower case.
• ...

You may want to have a look at CMake . This tool can help you generating compilation project file for the same source to be compiled on different plateform. Then, you can generate vcproj/sln files to compile your code with Visual Studio on Windows, MakeFile(s) to compile it under Linux and XCode project files to compile it under MacOS. If somewone wants to compile you code under Windows with another compiler than Microsoft, it's also possible!

Also note that recent version of VS (2015) propose to compile for other targets that Windows (at least Android). But never tried that.

Answer 2

The compiler itself is pretty standard confroming by know (if you turn off the extensions) and more importantly, you can use the clang frontend (which is the default compiler on Mac) directly from within VS2015, so it is definitvely possible to write cross-platform code in VS (although it's certainly easier to use Windows specific constructs than it where if you'd use eg cygwin).

However, the windows API for network I/O is different from the one for Mac, so you should probably use a corssplatform library like boost asio for that.

As far as multithreading is concerned, you can do it in a standard and portable manner using the standard library's functions, classes and synchronization primitives, but the past has shown that they are often not the most efficient way to go. However, in most situations you'll want to use a more highlevel library for parallel programming anyway. The default on Windows is the PPL which is - I believe - not cross-platform, but there are other libraries you can use

Finally, you can use VS to remotely build your applications on Mac or Linux PCs using their local compilers and libraries. However, I don'T know, how well that works in practice.