I have one gigabyte of memory using win 7 x64 and core i3-380M, my laptop is oftenly freeze for a couple second when I type a bunch of code also in compilation. I'm sorry for these stupid question, what does precompiled header ?

1 GB seems somewhat underpowered, especially for a 64 bit OS.

Precompiled headers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precompiled_header

If you include large header files, like windows.h, that file gets compiled again and again without having been changed. So you typically put these headers into one "master" .h file, and make this the source of the "precompiled header", preventing it from being compiled again if the contents didn't change.

Both VC++ and GCC have support for precompiled headers.

to be honest.. I doubt that with 1gb of ram running win7 64 you'll be able to see improvements.

I see, that's what I'm concern about

I have one gigabyte of memory using win 7 x64 and core i3-380M, my laptop is oftenly freeze for a couple second when I type a bunch of code also in compilation. I'm sorry for these stupid question, what does precompiled header ?

1 GB seems somewhat underpowered, especially for a 64 bit OS.

Precompiled headers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precompiled_header

If you include large header files, like windows.h, that file gets compiled again and again without having been changed. So you typically put these headers into one "master" .h file, and make this the source of the "precompiled header", preventing it from being compiled again if the contents didn't change.

Both VC++ and GCC have support for precompiled headers.

oke, so these one of my problem in including header that makes my compilations get slower and slower plus my ram didn't meet minimum requirement for x64 architecture, got it,

I find Java* based IDEs like Netbeans far too slow and heavy for some reason. Eclipse is marginally better because it has a larger amount of native code. Visual Studio is faster still because that is pretty much all native (has very little .NET code in there).

However, slow compile times are likely due to the compiler rather than IDE. Visual Studio uses cl whereas netbeans uses g++ (Mingw port which is not entirely native to the OS). I find cl to be a little bit faster in compile times on Windows so Visual Studio might be the better choice again.

Then again, nvi and Makefiles is all I use these days anyway.

* I dont know if it is the fault of Java or if Netbeans is just too overly modular. It seemed to be just as slow when compiled with gcj (native java compiler). It gives me motion sickness just using it for a few mins ;)

Actually most of Visual Studio IDE is now .NET and more specifically WPF ever since the 2010 release. Even the extension framework for VS is in .NET for VS.

Visual Studio is a really powerfull IDE but I find it sometimes too heavy and not very intuitive. So if your goal is to make a "little" programming then I would suggest other IDE such as Netbean or code::blocks. In the other hand, if you know how to use Visual Studio I'm sure it can offer you many advantages :)

Well CB doesn't offer the features that visual studio does, but it's a bit more flexible. You can use any compiler you want, the VC++ compiler if you want, while visual studio is stuck to it's only one.

Technically not true, since Visual Studio does support makefile projects it can be used with with any tool/compiler. As an example I used it with Mingw to build homebrews for Nintendo DS.

Visual Studio with Visual Assist X is the best C++ environment I have ever used. Qt Creator and Eclipse are alright too.

In most situations compiling shouldn't be painfully slow, so a hardware upgrade should be considered first. You will need it in any case. Get multi-core CPU with at least 2.8 Ghz speed and 4 GB system RAM. I have even read about tapping into a VGA (dedicated graphics card) to add processing power for compiling but I know nothing about it personally. I never heard of VS allowing that, so it has its limits.

Clinton

You should NOT be using a 64 bit OS with 1GB of ram. Why would you do that? A 64 bit OS is inherently more RAM hungry and slower when RAM constrained than a 32-bit OS. Not to mention that the 32 bit version of Windows 7 is SLIGHTLY more compatible with old Win 32 games (such as Civ 2 and Fallout 3).

The whole world is moving to 64-bit OSes, but not just for the fun of it, the only reason for the move is Virtual Memory Address Space (more than 4GB of it) .. you wont see ANY benefit to a 64-bit OS until you have more than 2 GB of RAM, or more than 3 GB total of RAM + Video Memory. All of my computers have finally moved to 64-bit OSes, but that's cause they have between 4 GB and 16 GB of RAM (and 1-2 GB video cards). I promise you will see 5-10% faster performance on a 32 bit OS, and have about 50-200 MB more free memory from Windows 7.

As for free C++ IDE, I've used Visual C++ Express 2008 and 2010 (which were required by the older XNA SDKs) and like them just fine. I haven't used VS 2012 express yet, partially because there is no longer an XNA for it, and I'm not currently doing any open source / indie work so I'm just using the professional version. And partially because of this: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/01/ive-given-up-on-visual-studio-express-2012-for-windows-desktop-heres-why/. Although I have to say that VS 2012 is better than 2010 in some simple ways, I just can't believe they removed the exception diag feature - way to help the beginners.

Code Blocks has been highly recommended for years as well, and in the game dev beginner community I pretty only see those 2 (Visual Studio Express and Code Blocks) used with enough users to be helpful.

If you use VS Express be aware of a few things. 1. you CAN make multi-project solutions, you just have to tell it to ADD a project to an existing open solution ... and it will then be visible (the solution is hidden by default). 2. you CAN make it remember tabs instead of spaces, you just have to use REGEDIT to change the settings, since they removed this setting (and most) from the Options dialog.

Visual Studio 2012 is definitely my favorite, but when I'm on linux I like CodeLite which is also multi-platform. The IDE is not a system hog at all and it is very flexible, much like Code::Blocks.

It's really going to be a personal choice type of thing here in a lot of ways, though there are good arguments for some of the truly more functional ones. Also people are saying it is the compiler that is slow, but an IDE can definitely feel slow and unresponsive during use completely apart from the compilation stage...