which version you recommend ?

[onauc]

frankly, you won’t personally know me better by starting at some text on your screen.

[grankor]

Well, to answer at least one question. If you are first starting out, and running windows, I recommend Miscrosoft's version. It'll run with windows without having memory allocation problems. I ran into that using Borland when I first started. There were all kinds of bugs and patched, so I just got microsoft Visual studio. Works fine for me.

[jwenting]

All self-respecting C compilers from about 1985 onwards and all selfrespecting C++ compilers from about 2000 onwards (give or take a few years in each case) will support AT LEAST the same common set of functions as defined by ISO/ANSI.

On top of that each will come with a set of custom libraries for the operating system it's designed to work on, these will indeed differ per manufacturer and operating system.
As long as you stick to the standard when learning any modern compiler will do.
That will mean you're not going to make fancy GUI programs of course as that's where the most obvious platform specific libraries are :)

As to Borland and Microsoft, Borland has the better product with better standards support (though Microsoft is getting there, they currently have about 95% support where Borland has 97.5% or so) but Microsoft's is marketed better which gives them the edge commercially.
I've never experienced problems with Borland products having poor memory management code. Most likely grankor didn't know how to properly create such code and by the time he switched to Microsoft VC++ he had learned...

[grankor]

Didn't know how to do it right? :cry:

Naw, it was when mirco-nuts was competing with Borland, and before all the anti-trust stuff. Borland incompatible with Microsoft, and rather than messing with downloading on my dialup, I changed to MS Visual. i just stuck with MS, simply because I had more experience with it.

[jwenting]

I've been using Borland compilers since their very first C++ compiler and never had problems with them...
Yes, their object code is incompatible with Microsoft linkers but the exe code generated by the linker works fine. That's why Borland have their own linkers...