This blog post summarizes changes to the vcpkg package manager as part of the 2026.02.27 and 2026.03.18 registry releases and the 2026-02-17, 2026-02-21, and 2026-03-04 tool releases. These updates include a security fix for OpenSSL packaging on Windows, parallel file installation for improved performance, and other improvements and bug fixes.

• There are now 2,773 total ports available in the vcpkg curated registry. A port is a versioned recipe for building a package from source, such as a C or C++ library.
• 42 new ports were added to the curated registry.
• 415 ports were updated in February and 321 ports were updated in March. As always, we validate each change to a port by building all other ports that depend on or are depended by the library that is being updated for our main triplets.
• 158 community contributors made commits.
• The main vcpkg repo has over 7,400 forks and 26,800 stars on GitHub.

vcpkg changelog (2026.02.27, 2026.03.18 releases)

• Security fix for OpenSSL on Windows: The 2026.03.18 release contains a fix for a vulnerability in how vcpkg packaged OpenSSL on Windows (CVE-2026-34054). If you only want to update OpenSSL, you can override the selected version to 3.6.1#3 or later (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg#50518).
• vcpkg now installs files in parallel, improving installation performance by an average of 1.39x in our testing (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1896).
• vcpkg now uses libcurl directly for downloads instead of invoking the curl command line. This improves download reliability and performance (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1906).
• Dependency resolution has been optimized for improved performance, thanks @dg0yt! (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1891).
• Fixed missing executable permissions on downloaded tools for Unix systems, thanks @zynfly! (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1911).
• Fixed mismatched VCPKG_ROOT warnings when Visual Studio has its own vcpkg installation (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1931).
• Deduplication of additional_file entries in ABI info now improves binary cache hit rates (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1914).
• The default minimum Ninja version has been updated to a more reasonable value, thanks @cqundefine! (PR: Microsoft/vcpkg-tool#1897).
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

Documentation updates

• The vcpkg maintainer guide was updated with revised policies for the curated registry, including guidelines for port maturity, project activity, port naming conventions, and PR review expectations (PR: MicrosoftDocs/vcpkg-docs#568).

Total ports available for tested triplets

Triplet	Ports available
x86-windows	2583
x64-windows	2714
x64-windows-release	2714
x64-windows-static	2594
x64-windows-static-md	2648
arm64-windows	2346
arm64-windows-static-md	2329
arm64-osx	2528
x64-linux	2725
arm64-linux	2091
arm-neon-android	2135
x64-android	2197
arm64-android	2144

While vcpkg supports a much larger variety of target platforms and architectures (as community triplets), the list above is validated exhaustively to ensure updated ports don’t break other ports in the catalog.

Thank you to our contributors

vcpkg couldn’t be where it is today without contributions from our open-source community. Thank you for your continued support! The following people contributed to the vcpkg, vcpkg-tool, or vcpkg-docs repos in this release (listed by commit author or GitHub username):

aboelens	Ada Tufankjian	Adrien Bourdeaux	Aleksi Sapon
Alexander	Alexander Neumann	Alexander Vieth	Alexis La Goutte
Alexis Placet	Andreas Pfaffenbichler	Andrei Gramakov	Andrew Kaster
Andrew Tribick	Andy García	Andy Neebel	Ankur Verma
Anton Kolesnyk	Ayush Acharjya	Ayush Sah	Ben Foxworthy
Bertin Balouki SIMYELI	Bertrand Lebonnois	Cadons	CCP Toebeans
chenjunfu2	Chris Gnam	Chris Leishman	Christian Schulte
Chuck Walbourn	Chungmin Lee	Connector Switch	Connor Broyles
Connor MacDonald	CQ_Undefine	cuihairu	Dalton Messmer
Daniel Collins	Danilo Díaz Tarascó	day253	Dennis
Dewey Dunnington	dmitriyrazboev	Dr. Patrick Urbanke	Duncan Horn
Eduard Mishkurov	Egor Tyuvaev	ekoby	Emre
Ethan J. Musser	Ethin Probst	Francisco Facioni	Glenn Waldron
Gordon Smith	greenTableWork	Gustavo Monteiro	Harald
Hasan Altan Birler	hesphoros	hmmhmmhm/	hoshiizumiya
Hossein Moein	Ioannis Makris	Ivan Maidanski	jalegido
James Grant	Jia Yue Hua	Jinwoo Sung	JoergAtGithub
Joger Hansegard	John	Jon Spencer	Jonatan Nevo
Jonny	Josep Llodrà	jreichel-nvidia	Julius Künzel
Kai Blaschke	Kai Pastor	Kaito Udagawa	kiwixz
kzhdev	Laurent Rineau	LEE KYOUNGHEON	Li Yanxu
Lnkqwq	Luc Touraille	Markus87	Matthew A Johnson
Maurice Prather	Maxime Gervais	Mérill Téterel	Michael Nosthoff
Michael Schmuki	Michał Janiszewski	Mido Tarek	Mingxin Wang
Minh Dang Binh	miyan	Mohamed Koubaa	monty
Morcules	Moritz Beutel	Muhammad Tayyab Akram	N’yoma Diamond
Nic Crane	Nick D’Ademo	onalante-ebay	Orange++
Osyotr	PARK DongHa	pastdue	Pat Wang
Pedro López-Cabanillas	Piers Roberts	Pollux	Radames Cruz
Rafael Kitover	Raúl Cumplido	Rémy Tassoux	Riccardo
robbert-ef	Robin WILS	Rusty Conover	Saad
Saikari	Sean Farrell	Sebastian Schäfer	Silvio Traversaro
Sourabh Mehta	SunBlack	Takatoshi Kondo	talregev
Theodore Tsirpanis	Tim Blechmann	Tim Paine	Timofei Zhakov
Timothy Pearson	Tobias Leibner	Tobias Markus	Todor Prokopov
toge	Tom Conder	Tomasz Kalisiak	user-45-20
Victor Gordan	Vijai Kumar S	Vincent Le Garrec	Vitalii Koshura
VuYeK	Waldemar Kornewald	Weihang Ding	xavier2k6
xiaotang	Yingfan Guo	Yoctopuce dev	Yunze Xu
Zheng Xueke	逐雁南飛

Learn more

You can find the main release notes on GitHub. Recent updates to the vcpkg tool can be viewed on the vcpkg-tool Releases page. To contribute to vcpkg documentation, visit the vcpkg-docs repo. If you’re new to vcpkg or curious about how a package manager can make your life easier as a C/C++ developer, check out the vcpkg website – vcpkg.io.

If you would like to contribute to vcpkg and its library catalog, or want to give us feedback on anything, check out our GitHub repo. Please report bugs or request updates to ports in our issue tracker or join more general discussion in our discussion forum.