for windows if I'm going for IDE I like the borland compiler. The only thing I don't like about the Borland compiler is that it doesn't ever give any meaningfull errors. If I'm going for a barebones compiler I'll use DJGPP but I won't like it, barebones compilers take to damn long to do the really big projects but they are great for programming something real quick that only has 1 or 2 class files. Actually my favorite compiler is JDK but that's for java, someone needs to port it to C++. JDK cut's my debug time in half cause the errors it gives me are like this is wrong expecting this not just syntax error line 27.