I also hate complexity and I'm not a C/C++ professional creating apps for billions of people so when I need a tool or a program I just use microsoft build tools

I also hate complexity and I'm not a C/C++ professional creating apps for billions of people so when I need a tool or a program I just use microsoft build tools from visual studio 2019 in a batch script to compile/run from a single source file: @echo off call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat" :loop cl /nologo /Ob0 /O2 ./main.c /Fe"main.exe" && "./main.exe" echo. pause goto loop This calls the environment-setting script and uses cl.exe from that env, then compiles and if successfull executes the program on the terminal. Visual Studio current state is disgusting. vscode is an attempt to fix that but it is very slowly going the same route. Edit: I try to depend heavily on win32, because they invested a ton of time creating the documentation, and stopped changing things every month (which is literally the ONLY thing software seems to be UNABLE to do, ffs), and win32 functions work most of the time with simple setup, and usually return a code if it succeeded or not, instead of sending some obscure event to god-knows-where that has to be handled with signals, or messaging or dark rituals! And there's an example for pretty much every function call, what more does a mortal need? Everything that came after win32 is a hit-or-miss, undocumented, no examples, or just chaotic interfaces.