I'd expect some games that had to be played with release engineering. If the code is properly modularized, this could be two separate processes where you develop your module with mock data and then deploy it into production. Is the opinion really that all the current IDEs suck - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx , http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ , http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/ , http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html and all the 2nd tier as well? Maybe I am too deep into Java and eclipse, but it seems there are genuine advantages to using IDEs and C++ is similar enough to java that at least for some subset, such a tool could be created. If not, that certainly seems like a market...

C++ does look similar to Java, but it's really not. Preprocessor magic + template magic + linking magic means pain.

I will admit to not having tried devc++ or visualc. I would imagine that visualc might be able to solve the problem, since they can control the build system, and can hook into their compiler directly (last I checked, GCC made this very hard).

I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that you may be overestimating the pain points other people experience /not/ using an IDE.

I haven't done professional work in C++ only my thesis project which was relatively self contained and simple, so maybe I am underestimating the importance of preprocessor/template/linking magic. There is certainly a rather large barrier to entry for vim/emacs for the average developer.

I decided to put up a poll about this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574697 maybe enough people will answer to be interesting?