Throughout its long lifetime, Visual Assist (VA) has been a top-of-the-line productivity plugin with a performance advantage over Visual Studio and other plugins. Performance and speed has been a bread-and-butter factor for choosing VA—and we’ve doubled down with updates focused on cutting interruptions and load times.
VA had significant improvements in 2024, particularly in the initial startup time for projects, as well as in the responsiveness of a few key features. It is not farfetched to say that performance has been the primary consideration for the development direction of the plugin.
Why? Because performant, responsive software is productive software, and fast interaction is key to you getting your work done.
We have a lot of solid, robust features based purely on providing not the kitchen sink, but what you need. We already had a reputation for being faster than other products. Now we are even faster: VA is a lean, mean, coding machine.
We’re midway through the year, and we’re summarizing all the recent performance updates in this handy update blog. Read on further to get a more complete picture of when and why these changes were introduced to VA.
Table of Contents
Faster startup sequence
Whatever task you have, you first must open and launch Visual Studio—along with any installed plugins you have. Opening a Visual Studio-associated file initiates the startup process which starts loading the essential IDE assets, the solution files you have chosen, and ultimately any auxiliary components like Visual Assist.
While we cannot alter the core loadout of Visual Studio, we’ve worked on every facet of our tool that can be optimized for faster startup:
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Project initial parsing
Project parsing is an extra step that code assistant plugins like Visual Assist need to undertake. VA uses its own parser independent of Visual Studio’s which allows it to pre-scan projects so it can be faster, smarter, and able to provide different functions.
The release in January 2024 featured an overhaul of the parser, which reduced startup times for opening previously unparsed project files by up to 15 times.
While an initial parse is only done the first time you open a project. The next time you open it, it will be instant. (This was an existing feature.) However, we made it 15x faster for those of you who are opening multiple new projects on a more frequent basis.For example, an Unreal Engine project with its typically massive code base previously took 15 minutes to parse. We’ve brought this down to a mere one minute of parsing.
Tech details: Visual Assist implemented a cache for parsed directories to bypass slow Windows file IO API calls where the same call is expected to give the same result—this significantly reduced the initial parse time.
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Plugin load time
This update refers to the time it takes for Visual Assist’s features to become functional. As mentioned above, the time-to-functional is the sum of all Visual Studio’s startup routine which includes loading in plugins.
Every time you close and open a solution, VA’s features take a few moments to load—or at least that’s how it was before. With this update, time-to-functional is more or less instantaneous even in extremely large solutions!As soon as Visual Studio calls on Visual Assist to start loading, you’ll immediately see coloring and syntax highlighting, and have access to all navigation and features. (Note: How Visual Studio initializes plugins and components is indeterminate; results may vary slightly depending on how many components it loads first before Visual Assist.)
What these changes mean for you:
Depending on how often you need it, the Visual Studio startup sequence and project load can be a part of your feedback cycle when testing and coding. And even a mere 30 seconds are painful and a threat to productivity when repeated, especially when they add up in a work week.
This is even more pronounced when your work entails opening new projects multiple times in a week. Visual Assist is the best in-class plugin that offers significantly less startup time—giving you more time to be productive.
Search dialogs: Find References and File Finding
Since starting our crusade against a slow and unresponsive IDE, there have been two updates that shortened the loading time for finding references and symbols. Utilizing techniques such as parallelism and removing extraneous string searches, you’ll enjoy up to ten times faster search time.
Furthermore, better accuracy and new functionality has been added for other search dialogs, including fuzzy search for Open File in Solution.
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Find references speed and responsiveness
Find references is a feature that looks for symbol usage within the current project or solution. Depending on the project size, there may be hundreds to thousands of symbol definitions in your solution, and many of those, tens of thousands of times they may be used. In order for code navigation to work, VA must scour its database for the correct results.
Find references time increases with the number of symbols in the database. However, VA’s feature has been greatly improved for performance and speed—almost ten times faster than before! That means that this performance improvement applies to many key features and navigations.
Some other common and key features in VA improved by this change:
- Renaming finds references in order to rename them.
- Implement Methods finds methods in order to know which ones do and do not exist
- Change signature works similarly.
Visual Assist’s Find references window. Takes significantly less time to find all references in 2024.3.
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Fuzzy search and uppercase search for opening files and searching symbols
Fuzzy search is a technique used in searches and information retrieval to find approximate matches for a given query, accommodating variations like typos and misspellings. It employs string distance metrics to measure the similarity between strings.
Apart from being fast, Open File in Solution and Find Symbol in Solution support this technique, so you can expect more meaningful results with fewer, less accurate search queries.
Furthermore, beyond fuzzy searching for inexact matches, VA will also match capital letters. For example, if you have a class named MyClassName, searching for “mcn” would find it. Similarly, suppose you have a global variable named myGlobalVariable and type “mgv” – the lowercase “my” is treated as if it were MyGlobalVariable, providing expected results.
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Move Class feature
Refactoring and moving entire classes can be a hassle. This feature has completed its beta phase to provide full support for porting an entire class to the file(s) of your choosing.
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Bonus QoL Change: Select all items in open file in solution (Ctrl + A)
You can now select and highlight multiple files and open them simultaneously when using open file in solution. The usual shortcut Ctrl + A works.
What these changes mean for you:
As a C++ developer, you frequently search for files and symbols in massive projects. So even small reductions in wait times or interruptions cumulatively boost your overall productivity to a significant degree.
Summary
Performance improvements are and will remain the focus of Visual Assist in upcoming releases. As projects grow larger and C++ features grow in complexity, we too must adapt and scale our performance to meet the increasing workload and demands on our parser and product capabilities.
This is our most important aim: speedy performance and accurate responses so you can focus on thinking and problem solving—the crucial parts of coding.
We’re only halfway through the year, so let us know what we should improve upon next. Thank you for your continued use and support of Visual Assist!