What is a good and simple compiler?

[georgedb]

I had a look at Microsoft's Visual C++ / Studio, but that environment is huge. I even don't mind to use Notepad as an editor, but the compiler should be something simple. It will be for use under Windows 7. It's just for practising, at this moment I have no plans to start developing Windows programs, it's just that I want to learn the language C++ (as it is the language to be used for the compiler for my ARM processor). I also had a look at GNU, but was not able to trace a W32 simple executable. I also see old versions of Borland's C++ under DOS, but I'm looking for something under Windows.

[Albatross]

If you want just a compiler (can't you access the VC++ compiler from the command line?), then I'd recommend MinGW, which I think is what you've been looking for.

http://mingw.org/

-Albatross

[MaxT]

Take a look at Dev C++. Its a light IDE and uses Mingw

[Albatross]

Take a look at Dev C++

Please do not recommend that archaic piece of a Ford Model T on these forums. Dev-C++ is really old and it belongs in a CS museum... :/

-Albatross

[moorecm]

I recommend creating a virtual machine running Linux for development. The GCC tools are readily available and you can use emacs/vim as an editor.

[georgedb]

VM with Linux / Emacs / VIM: not my idea of an easy start... I had a look at MingW, but that one is also like 1.5Gb. Why does it all have to be some extremely huge. I remember Turbo Pascal 3.01, which fit on a 360Kb disk. Including the editor and my program files. OK, I prefer not to use DOS anymore and would like to have some Windows compiler, but it's all sooooo big... It seems Visual C++ with Visual Studio is sort of the de facto standard, but I just want to play a bit (basically only because my mbed.org compiler is limited to a certain chip and I want to learn just a little bit more of C++...

[Galik]

Its much more that just a compiler but I always install Cygwin on Windows machines: http://sourceware.org/cygwin/

You can download the windows installer here: http://sourceware.org/cygwin/setup.exe

You probably need to select the gcc-c++ package in the installer.

I like it because you get a whole bunch of unix like tools with it, not least of which is a bash shell which is a billion times better than DOS.

[kaduuk]

Please do not recommend that archaic piece of a Ford Model T on these forums. Dev-C++ is really old and it belongs in a CS museum... :/

Why? He never said it was bloodshed's version (which was last updated 5 years ago)... Just use the wxDev c++ and you're fine (which was last updated feb 2010) ;)

[Athar]

I had a look at MingW, but that one is also like 1.5Gb.

What makes you think that? A full installation of MinGW is ~80 MB.
You should use the version of MinGW that comes bundled with Code::Blocks (TDM MinGW 4.4 - the official MinGW builds and the newer TDM build are broken).
Code::Blocks makes a fine IDE too - using Notepad would be an unjustifiable waste of development time.