As far as I am aware, on Windows, for C/C++ modules that need compiled, there are no options other than Visual Studio. I have to qualify this by saying that I have had an MSDN license for a decade and haven't been forced to find a work-around. If you could find a Community Edition of it that would probably be enough.

The other aspect of this question is how often this actually is needed. I'd say it really depends on the type of development you are doing. But you can expect that any project with a sufficiently large amount of dependencies will have at least one that requires building this way. But I am surprised how often this isn't the case, and often those modules are soft dependencies.