When I wrote the Windows version of the book I used Visual Studio and it was quite excellent. But Visual Studio Code (VSC), the free cross-platform IDE is also very impressive.

Not only does it let you create your own extensions but you can even include debugging and visual debugging like Visual Studio.

I installed Clang and it’s associated debugger lldb. It is pretty powerful, The only thing that is a bit difficult with VSC is the learning curve for configuring builds, etc. With the Microsoft C/C++ extension there are four JSON files that must be configured for compiling, debugging etc.

The picture is from the website for the Visual Studio code marketplace. There are currently over 16,000 extensions most if not all (I haven’t checked them all!) are free and support virtually every popular programming language and probably one or two I haven’t heard of.