Compilers: visual studio is a very respectable C++ compiler nowadays. It lags slightly behind clang and g++, but is the compiler of choice on windows. clang is

Compilers: visual studio is a very respectable C++ compiler nowadays. It lags slightly behind clang and g++, but is the compiler of choice on windows. clang is now the equal of g++. Unless you have a reason not to, use visual studio on windows, clang on mac os x, and either clang or g++ on linux. Build systems: cmake seems increasingly popular nowadays, but doesn't solve all autotools related issues. C++11: If you are willing to require a reasonably recent version of each compiler, you can happily use almost every C++11 feature. auto and decltype are the two which I use the most day to day, and greatly help simplify code. If you are willing to use the very most recent version of clang or g++ (by which I mean gcc 4.9, released a couple of days ago), there is almost complete C++14 support. C++14 is mostly a cleanup, the only significant thing I have been using is generic lambda functions (lambda functions are in C++11). Debugging: on mac there is lldb, never tried running it on linux. clang and g++ now have 'sanitizers' built in. I haven't use the g++ one, the clang memory sanitizer catches several bugs which valgrind misses (as valgrind is poor at detecting stack related issues). Threads: C++11 has std::thread. It works fine for me but I don't do anything super fancy.