Presentation Name / 1 Visual C++ Builds and External Dependencies NAME

Presentation Name / 2 About Us  Leader in building and servicing financial technology since 1985; providing “Cloud” solutions since 1996  2,000+ institutions including hedge funds and traditional asset managers  Software and service supporting the full investment lifecycle  Features include trade order and execution management; compliance; portfolio accounting; and real-time market data as an internet service  More than 25 years of working with Microsoft Visual C++  Current software stack is mostly C++ native code on windows

Presentation Name / 3 An Evolution of Builds

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Presentation Name / 11 End of the line  Version control is tasked with storing all binaries and third party libraries, and becomes unmanageable  Build are difficult to reproduce  Build process becomes tightly coupled to the version control system

Presentation Name / 12 Why are C++ builds so hard?  Libraries come simply as header files and some kind of binary lib, with no structured manifest.  Differences between versions of the compiler and standard library will break binary compatibility.  C++ projects are often targeting multiple platforms (32bit, 64bit) or operating systems (Windows, Linux).

Presentation Name / 13 The pre-processor and parser  The C++ parser is single pass, so all symbols must be declared before they are used, and order matters.  The compiler has no knowledge of libraries, and instead depends on the preprocessor to unroll all includes and present it with a single text stream. Unlike modern languages that can provide the compiler with a structured manifest.  With its use of #ifdefs, #defines, #includes, etc… the preprocessor can be very complex.  The behavior of the preprocessor and compiler is very dependent on the environment in which it runs, including system configuration, compiler version, “system” header files, and environment variables.

Presentation Name / 14 The linker  Dependent on environment variables and system libraries  Object files carry no information about their contents beyond the names of the symbols. The linker cannot verify the correctness of the link beyond matching names.  Every member of an object’s dependency tree must be present and specified for a link to succeed, however there is no way to discover this info without knowing this info ahead of time.

Presentation Name / 15 What’s Next? Dependencies!!!

Presentation Name / 16 What are dependencies  Everything you need to build your application  Code  Headers  Libraries  Pre-Preprocessors  Compilers  Linkers  Tools

Presentation Name / 17 How do we manage dependencies?  There is a whole world of package managers out there for other systems….  What about Visual C++?

Presentation Name / 18 What is NuGet  NuGet is a package manager originally designed to work with Visual Studio and the.net platform.  All NuGet packages are identified by their package ID and their version.  Packages.config lists all the packages for a project.  Packages can come from anywhere  NuGet Packages can have dependencies of their own.  This is the structured metadata we need!

Presentation Name / 19 NuGet for C++  As of version 2.5, NuGet added support for C++ projects.  Originally, NuGet packages just contained dependency files and required the IDE to figure out the correct behavior based on context and file types.  To support C++, NuGet packages have to be able to modify the msbuild scripts for the project.  When a C++ NuGet package is added to a project, any msbuild properties or targets files are imported into the project’s msbuild script.

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Presentation Name / 21 DEMO

Presentation Name / 22 What’s Next?

Presentation Name / 23 Ultimate Reproducibility and Containment  Storing the entire build server environment as metadata.  Compilers and other tools could be distributed as NuGet packages or possibly as docker containers referenced by NuGet packages.  Microsoft seems to be embracing the model, and we might soon see the Microsoft compilers shipped as packages.  Only need your source repository and msbuild to build your application on any machine.

Presentation Name / 24 Q&A