Back in the day I used LCC-Win32 as my main development platform. It was rather cool to have such a nice compiler/IDE for free. Extremely fast, produced small binaries, had a nice debugger, code completion and API reference at the press of a button. Everything VS had (except C++ obviously) in about 10mb of memory. Also, it used to include extra documents explaining how the author went about writing the code editor, the compiler, the IDE, and the history of the whole thing.<p>I used Pelles C for a while, mainly for Windows CE development. Although the IDE was nice, I still preferred LCC-Win32 for Windows development. I have no idea how both environments have progressed in the last 4 years or so.<p>Check LCC-Win32 here: <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/</a>
If you're on Windows and in need of a solid C/C++ compiler, may I suggest Open Watcom:<p><a href="http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Main_Page</a><p>I believe they have binaries for Linux as well these days but I haven't tried them yet.