C++0x support in VC10 (VS2010)

I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 since the Beta 2 release and just a couple days ago installed the Release Candidate.

VC10 has support for some of the features of C++0x and I wanted to get a head start on playing with the features so that when we switch production environments at work I will be ready to start taking advantage.

While getting to know VC10 and C++0x, I’ve noticed a couple low-severity issues that I wanted to point out:

Lambda Functions

Lambda functions allow you to create an inline functor. They don’t supply any new capabilities of the language, but they cut out a lot of noise. Here is an example usage:

std::vector<int> numbers;

numbers.push_back(1);
numbers.push_back(2);

std::for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [](int number){ std::cout << number << std::endl; });

Pre-C++0x, you would have had to write this:

struct Functor {
  void operator()(int number) {
    std::cout << number << std::endl;
  }
};

std::vector<int> numbers;
numbers.push_back(1);
numbers.push_back(2);

std::for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), Functor());

The thing that I have noticed is that if you use using-declarations throughout your code, not all of them get captured from inside of the lambda. For example, this does not work:

void exampleFunction( const std::vector<int>& numbers ) {
using std::cout;
using std::endl;

std::for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [](int number){ cout << number << endl; });

For some reason, endl is not captured, and the VC10 compiler throws an error. However, either of these do work:

void exampleFunction2( const std::vector<int>& numbers) {
  std::for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [](int number){ std::cout << number << std::endl; });
}

// or

using namespace std;
void exampleFunction3( const std::vector<int>& numbers) {
  std::for_each(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), [](int number){ cout << number << endl; });
}

Also, if the lambda-return-type-clause is not specified, then implicit type conversion warnings do not get generated:

std::deque<int> integers;
std::transform(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), std::front_inserter(integers), [](int number){
  return number > 0 ? number / 2.0 : number * 2;  // no warning here
});

std::transform(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), std::front_inserter(integers), [](int number) -> int {
  return number > 0 ? number / 2.0 : number * 2;  // warning C4244: 'return' : conversion from 'double' to 'int', possible loss of data
});

It doesn’t seem like the type inference is doing a great job with the compiler warning here. I would recommend explicitly specifying the lambda-return-type-clause to get full type checking by the compiler.