One of the BEST C IDE's available for free!
Pelles C - Simply the Best!
These days it seems you need at least 2 GB of disk space to have a decent C IDE. Not only that, but each generation IDEs seem to become more and more needlessly complicated. The usual culprits such as Microsoft are understood to thrive on wastefulness but even smaller compiler developers seem to thrive on adding more features that users simply do not need when they need to get to their code in a succinct manner.
Enter Pelles C. This IDE (Editor and Compiler) is freeware. This means you can do whatever you want with either of them, entirely free of charge or license restrictions. I have been using this IDE on and off for many years (over 8) and the UI has stayed simple and straightforward with a user from 8 years ago having no problem getting to work IMMEDIATELY on the latest release from March 2023. There is absolutely no difference in workflow.
In all honesty the updates are probably there to reassure users of continuing support and OS support more than anything because the compiler and editor are very bulletproof. This environment is EXCELLENT for education or for professionals who just want to get to the code and make sure their code remain portable and human readable, even in applications with many 10s of thousands of lines of code.
This gem of an IDE is a favorite of veteran C programmers but I believe it has not gotten the attention it deserves from the general programming public. While many C compilers abound, C compilers with a complete IDE released by the compiler maker as an integrated package are rare. The installed footprint of the entire IDE is around 200MB and it is LIGHTENING FAST to load and use the editor AND to compile your code. I’d put Pelles up against any C compiler in terms of speed of compilation. This becomes noticeable on large projects.
Last but not least, your code is highly readable and simple. C lends itself to this file organization but even the project system in Pelles is simple, unobtrusive and highly human editable/readable. As an example, just yesterday I needed to find some specific DLL code I had written for a game engine from over a year ago. I knew I had projects in VS Code and Pelles using the code but due to Pelles’ relative simplicity and lightness in project folder storage it took me about a minute to find a sample project in it that had the code I needed. I still have yet to find the relevant project in VS Code as I gave up after 45 minutes! I program in dozens of languages and had dozens of C projects cluttering up my hard drive in the course of a year plus so my use case may be a bit extreme. However the ease of keeping things organized in Pelles really made me feel the necessity to write this little article highlighting this incredible gem of a C IDE.
I would strongly advise anyone interested in C programming to give Pelles C a try. You can safely ignore the lack of an SSL certificate on the website as this project is charity ware. It is given away free of charge and the hosting is a bit of a financial strain on the developer. Certificates cost money/time to keep current. Give it a download at ~150MB and install it at ~200MB. You will be amazed at the simplicity of the user interface and how close you are to your C Code. For me it harkens back to the early days of VMS Cluster mainframes where you regularly wrote advanced simulation software and kept your entire C source project on a 3.5 Inch floppy disk in a simple directory. Today such a project, doing EXACTLY the same thing would require at least a couple megabytes with all sorts of extraneous XML and configuration files that require their own expertise to make sense of at the file system level.
I’ll close this article now. I have to get back to coding. Pelles makes me want to give back to the community as it has given me so much. Also, as any hard core C programmer would say with tongue in cheek, C is the only real programming language, everything else is just programming :-)