Remember the days of simple, no frills development tools like Turbo Pascal? If you long for a development system that doesn’t intimidate you with endless inscrutable options and assorted memory-hogging add-ins that you know you’ll never use, then take a look at Chinook Developer Studio. This version is completely free, but a commercial version with GUI form-designer will become available in the near future.

When you first get to grips with Chinook, you know it’s a bit different. For Windows users, cross-platform tools with a UNIX/Linux background often require a certain amount of mysterious configuration and setting up before they’ll work as advertised. But with Chinook, the bundled GNU GCC compiler and GNU GDB debugger are already confi gured to work perfectly with the IDE. Everything gets installed below Chinook’s home directory, and there’s no interference with other versions of wxWidgets elsewhere on your system.

The code editor uses syntax colouring, but otherwise it’s pretty basic. There’s no fancy code completion but, guess what, it’s possible to live without it! Build times are excellent, the program on a fast machine. You can fl ip quickly between debug and release builds, and although Chinook uses dynamic linking by default, it’s possible to link statically to the wxWidgets library.

Click here for the download homepage.