I agree: I tried Qt recently.. great IDE, but the Qt GUI API is a total mess-up and I hate it. You can still use it for create non-gui applications

About Mingw, I usually get my MinGW from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/ those are very up to date.

Yes mingwbuilds is very good. Infact the article I linked in the first post explain how to setup mingwbuilds with an IDE. I found mingwbuilds interesting for few extra reasons (despite the fact that those are always up to date, stand alone packages): finally someone provided DLLs for runtimes (so every time you create an executable including "iostream" you don't get extra 600 KB but you just need the DLL, now a simple hello world is few KB instead of ~0.5MB) and a working std::thread (still using Posix wrapper instead of native windows thread but that's ok)

Sadly, stopping at 4.7.1 makes TDM-GCC almost as unmaintained as official MINGW releases. The other suggestion, Stephen T. Lavavej's distribution, remains my first choice.

There is this project MinGW-w64 which seems fairly up to date. If you look at the builds, they have support for GCC 4.8.1, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms.

what exactly do you feel is missing, that you would like to use? While visual studio is missing quite a bit of C++11, it has a decent amount of it implemented, especially the more important bits. The other chunks and pieces that are missing aren't particularly important for most cases, doesn't mean you won't miss them though on the rare occasion.

There is a great deal to C++11, and no current compilers are "standards compliant," although clang makes a decent go at it.

That is minor in comparison to what is missing from Visual Studio. I have a feeling that gcc will be far better at implementing the standards than Microsoft.

I would consider the missing lack of a regular expressions library, part of the new standard library, to be a rather significant chunk of the C++ language to be missing. Especially since regular expressions tend to creep and find their way into so many different places you wouldn't expect them to.

what exactly do you feel is missing, that you would like to use? While visual studio is missing quite a bit of C++11, it has a decent amount of it implemented, especially the more important bits. The other chunks and pieces that are missing aren't particularly important for most cases, doesn't mean you won't miss them though on the rare occasion.

There is a great deal to C++11, and no current compilers are "standards compliant," although clang makes a decent go at it.

That is minor in comparison to what is missing from Visual Studio. I have a feeling that gcc will be far better at implementing the standards than Microsoft.

I would consider the missing lack of a regular expressions library, part of the new standard library, to be a rather significant chunk of the C++ language to be missing. Especially since regular expressions tend to creep and find their way into so many different places you wouldn't expect them to.

Yeah, clang really is pulling quite far ahead of gcc now, heck, even if you ignore the C++11/C99/C11 support clangs warnings and error messages alone are a good enough reason to use it over gcc. (allthough gcc is catching up in that area aswell now)