I'm starting my C++ learning, using CodeBlocks and windows, what compiler should I use?

Question

I'm under the impression certain compilers only work for making windows applications.

Answer 1

How about Visual Studio Express? This is a complete package with a very nice IDE.

Answer 2

Codeblocks supports many compilers. I recommend using CB with mingw for general purpose usage.

Answer 3

If you care about portability to Unix, use the mingw compilers which are based on gcc. Gcc is widely available on a lot of architectures and OS. If you only work for Windows, Visual Studio Express might be a better choice in comparison to Codeblocks.

Answer 4

Depends what you want to do. If you want to use POSIX APIs you may want to use mingw. If you distribute to Windows folks, you probably want to use Visual Studio since its compiler is usually better at producing optimized code.

CMake might be something you want to use if you want multiple platforms - it'll create your CodeBlocks/Eclipse/Visual Studio/GNU Make projects for you w/ all the correct settings.

Answer 5

If you want to develop GUI applications and/or go for maximum portability, go for MinGW for compiler, and Qt Creator for IDE (it comes with MinGW bundled).

If you want to stick to Windows, and don't mind coding UI directly using Win32 API, then Visual C++ Express would do the trick.

Answer 6

If you are keen on using Codeblocks mingw is a good choice. But C++ is not like Java. It is not write once run everywhere. Also it is not write once compile on different platforms and run everywhere.

You have to change your code for different platforms (win/unix etc...) (eg: socket programming differs on Windows and Linux)

This means that you are not platform independent. So I recommend you to go for a better one. Eclipse is good, community is great but for me QT or Visual Studio (6.0 or 2008 for .Net) would be better.