On Windows, just use Visual Studio Community. You don't need anything else, Microsoft's support for C++11/14/17 features is excellent. I'm not aware of any kill

On Windows, just use Visual Studio Community. You don't need anything else, Microsoft's support for C++11/14/17 features is excellent. I'm not aware of any killer licensing issues with the free version, the only limitation is that if you're an enterprise (> 5 users, > $1M revenue, that sort of thing) you need to buy a license. There isn't a problem with commercial development using the free version. You may also need to provide the VC++ redistributable with your application though. As for standard libraries, the STL is the standard library and you 'should' use that where possible. Boost is a mix of potential features for C++, a few modules that lots of people rely on (e.g. json, timers, asyncio), and a whole lot of undocumented and unmaintained code. I get by without it most of the time. Qt Creator is pretty decent even if you don't use Qt. You can use the qmake system which does lock you in somewhat, but it's easier to configure than cmake for a newcomer. You still get debugging/profiling and intelligent autocomplete/linting. If you don't mind the large library overhead, you can use Qt for a lot of brick-and-mortar code like dealing with filesystems, sockets/serial comms, parsing XML, etc. It's very well documented, updated often and it's GPL which is nice. Or you could statically link it. Personally I've found the Qt GUI framework much more intuitive than the native Windows stdafx stuff.