How reliable is visual c plus plus?

Answer 1

That depends on what you mean by reliable. If you mean does it conform to the C++ standard then no, it is not reliable. Look up the 'Microsoft specific' headings under each topic in the help file. In most cases these are enhancements to the standard, but there are a few diversions from the standard you need to watch out for, particularly if you intend to port your code to another C++ implementation.

If you mean can it be used to write reliable programs then yes, it can. However, reliability in this sense is mostly your own responsibility as programmer. The code provided by Microsoft is, for the most-part, reliable. Microsoft use the same code in-house so if a problem can be replicated then a hotfix or workaround is usually not far behind.

Answer 2

It's not so much that C++ is reliable, it's more that the language's high-level abstractions allow us to write reliable code more easily than we can with lower-level languages like C and assembly. The language itself won't actually prevent a programmer from writing unreliable code, but it does encourage us to write code in such a way that we can minimise programmer errors with little to no cost in terms of performance or memory consumption. But, as with all programming languages, we only get reliable code when we follow best coding practices.