[flukus]

> What am I missing?

The students don't know anything about the CLI. They might not know what a directory is or how to cd to it. They may have to install multiple packages. On certain operating systems they'll have to set some PATH variables.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be that easy, but due to failures in earlier education it's not.

[ryanpepper]

When I was taught C++ at University, we were just told to download Quincy which bundles a (pretty old) version of GCC with a text editor on Windows.

Once we had the basics down they introduced Linux, the command line interface to GCC, etc.

[AstralStorm]

Formerly, djgpp package. And the equivalent Windows IDE, can't remember its name but it shipped with Mingw.