C++ IDEs & Tools

This section documents C++23 (ISO/IEC 14882:2024), as published by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21 (wg21), verified against the freely available working draft N5046 (eel.is/c++draft) and cppreference.com.

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the working draft and cppreference.com before being relied on in production.

This section’s bibliography lists the reference material consulted while preparing these pages.

This page lists the IDEs and editors most commonly used to write C++, with a link to each product’s official page. Most of them drive a compiler such as GCC, Clang or MSVC and a build system such as CMake, so choose by platform and by how much integration you want.

IDEs

  • CLion — JetBrains' cross-platform IDE for C and C++, with CMake integration and a built-in debugger.

  • Visual Studio — Microsoft’s IDE for Windows, with the MSVC toolchain and a full debugger.

  • Eclipse CDT — the C/C++ Development Tooling for the Eclipse IDE.

  • Qt Creator — a cross-platform IDE with good CMake support, suited to C++ and Qt projects.

  • Code::Blocks — a free, lightweight, cross-platform IDE for C and C++.

  • Xcode — Apple’s IDE for macOS and iOS development, with the Clang toolchain.

Editors with extensions

  • VS Code C/C++ extension — adds IntelliSense, debugging and code navigation for C and C++ to Visual Studio Code.

See also