see above, no VS involvedyou can use Codelite, Ultimate++, or EclipseCDT

This is so true. I have MinGW, WSL, MSYS, Clang, VSCode, and VS. I have to juggle between them. I also hate VS, it does way too much for you and you get a bunch of garbage IDE files. I imagine MS engineers in every meeting: &quot;should we make this simple? Nah, let&#x27;s just add several layers of unnecessary bullshit, yeah that sounds good.&quot;

see above.would you like a guide for windows with method 3?methods 2&#x2F;4 should work out of the boxstill I recommend you to give a go to latest D (dmd or ldc2) with method 3(2 may work too)

In other words I&#x27;m very lost and in over my head.

I have 3 envs on my Windows work laptop1. PellesC =&gt; small C+win32 hobby2. Msys2+mingw64 =&gt; main env for rust too3. Clang-LLVM + Windows SDK + Cmake + jom (and Windows CRT from C3 install) =&gt; Works fine <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;llvm&#x2F;llvm-project&#x2F;releases&#x2F;download&#x2F;llvmorg-20.1.6&#x2F;clang+llvm-20.1.6-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.tar.xz">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;llvm&#x2F;llvm-project&#x2F;releases&#x2F;download&#x2F;llvmo...</a>(I use 3 for D too)4. I would like to add to your guide compiling with OpenWatcom V2 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-watcom&#x2F;open-watcom-v2">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;open-watcom&#x2F;open-watcom-v2</a>)5. Cygwin they have latest GCC 15 in testing6. Winlibs or equation.com mingw distros

Getting C++ Hello World working on Windows (a comedy & tragedy)