cpp2 / cppfront binding for MS Build

An example of integrating Herb Sutter's cppfront "c++2" prototype into Visual Studio's build system and IDE. Currently this example offers:

• MS Build and premake hooks to spin up a Visual Studio project with cpp2 support
• A dispatch shim tool that also runs clang-format on generated cpp1 code for easier reading and debugging
• A toy raytracer example project built with cpp2

Getting Started

1. Ensure you have the clang-cl compiler option enabled for Visual Studio 2022 - code generated by cppfront can frequently blow up the MSVC compiler, so we target clang by default (plus we copy out clang-format from the Visual Studio distribution)
2. Clone the repository, initialise submodules (cppfront, fmt and premake binaries in /ext)
3. Run build/premake.bat - this will build the dispatch tool (from build/cpp-dispatch), cppfront (from ext/cppfront) and copy clang-format into the right place

NOTE that you can copy over your own cppfront.exe build into build/_gen, replacing the one built from the source in ext/cppfront -- the tools are only built if build/_gen/cppfront.exe is not present.

NOTE ALSO that we have some custom modifications to cppfront specifically for the example project (extra metafunctions) - so if you bring your own build, you will not be able to build the example project code.

4. Load and run the solution from build/_gen/cpp2_msbuild_vs2022.sln; build and run to launch the raytracer - the default setup is set to use quite high sampling rates so you will need the Release build and plenty of CPU cores to get an image out without a long wait. The TGA result is written out next to the executable.

MS Build support

MS Build support is provided by rules defined in build/cpp2-msbuild. It provides the basic dependency tracking to ensure changes are rebuilt when .cpp2 or .h2 files are modified.

Options that map to cppfront command-line arguments are offered at project and file level.

The files utilise the dispatch tool to provide the clang formatting post-process, but this can trivially be removed with a few small edits if you prefer calling cppfront directly.