How to determine the version of the C++ standard used by the compiler?

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How do you determine what version of the C++ standard is implemented by your compiler? As far as I know, below are the standards I've known:

  • C++03
  • C++98
9 Answers

Please, run the following code to check the version.

#include<iostream>

int main() {
    if (__cplusplus == 201703L) std::cout << "C++17\n";
    else if (__cplusplus == 201402L) std::cout << "C++14\n";
    else if (__cplusplus == 201103L) std::cout << "C++11\n";
    else if (__cplusplus == 199711L) std::cout << "C++98\n";
    else std::cout << "pre-standard C++\n";
}

By my knowledge there is no overall way to do this. If you look at the headers of cross platform/multiple compiler supporting libraries you'll always find a lot of defines that use compiler specific constructs to determine such things:

/*Define Microsoft Visual C++ .NET (32-bit) compiler */
#if (defined(_M_IX86) && defined(_MSC_VER) && (_MSC_VER >= 1300)
     ...
#endif

/*Define Borland 5.0 C++ (16-bit) compiler */
#if defined(__BORLANDC__) && !defined(__WIN32__)
     ...
#endif

You probably will have to do such defines yourself for all compilers you use.

Normally you should use __cplusplus define to detect c++17, but by default microsoft compiler does not define that macro properly, see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msvc-now-correctly-reports-__cplusplus/ - you need to either modify project settings to include /Zc:__cplusplus switch, or you could use syntax like this:

#if ((defined(_MSVC_LANG) && _MSVC_LANG >= 201703L) || __cplusplus >= 201703L)
     //C++17 specific stuff here
#endif

Depending on what you want to achieve, Boost.Config might help you. It does not provide detection of the standard-version, but it provides macros that let you check for support of specific language/compiler-features.

__cplusplus

In C++0x the macro __cplusplus will be set to a value that differs from (is greater than) the current 199711L.

C++0x FAQ by BS

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