The C/C++ DevTools can cause around 20 Find All References calls for a symbol with 450 references

Open
#14,267 3 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@sean-mcmanus is already working on this.

Since Mar 12, 2026.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Description

bug Feature: DevTools (Copilot) Feature: Find All References Language Service performance

With the C/C++ DevTools extension installed with "cpp-devtools.enableCppCodeEditingTools": true and a .github/copilot-instructions.md which is sufficient to get it to invoke the tools, ask copilot "which files contain references to class myClass" where myClass has 450 references across 30 TUs of reasonable size.

Bug: It'll issue a find all references call 20 times (potentially taking 45 seconds each time), which is really slow and the user can easily mistake it for being in an infinite loop. It sounds like the results from the 1st Find All References are supposed to be cached at some level.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
6.2k
Forks
1.7k
Avg merge
14h 46m
Merged PRs (30d)
61

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from microsoft/vscode-cpptools

All issues in microsoft/vscode-cpptools

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.