About history of _MSC_VER macro for visual C++

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recently I started to view some legacy code and frequently see this state in header files:

#if _MSC_VER > 1000
#pragma once
#endif // _MSC_VER > 1000

I missed some part of the history of Visual C++ or Visual Studio.
I think I can safely replace this macro statement with:

#pragma once

can any gurus share the origin of this kind of macro statement?

What I have tried:

I removed #if statement and have no issue.

Posted 6-Oct-20 8:11am

Southmountain

Updated 6-Oct-20 8:49am

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Daniel Pfeffer · Accepted Answer · 2020-10-06T08:50:00

Solution 1

_MSC_VER is a Microsoft-specific predefined macro. Versions of the Microsoft C/C++ compiler earlier than 10 (Visual Studio 2010, IIRC) didn't support this pragma, and would emit a warning message "unrecognized pragma", or something similar. The only purpose of the macro guard is to avoid this message.

If you are targeting later versions of Microsoft C/C++, you can remove the macro guard.

Posted 6-Oct-20 8:50am

Daniel Pfeffer

Comments

Southmountain 6-Oct-20 22:21pm

thank you very much!

BongoVR 7-Oct-20 1:13am

According to https://dev.to/yumetodo/list-of-mscver-and-mscfullver-8nd, _MSC_VER = 1000 refers to the first 32 bit compiler from Microsoft (Visual Studio 4.0) from the mid-1990s. So, it is REALLY safe to remove the macro.

Southmountain 7-Oct-20 18:47pm

thank you for the link!