Follow up question should probably be what is a good IDE setup for plain C. CGO support in VSCode for instance never really worked for me. How well does C/C++ plugin by Microsoft work on linux?
I knew a girl in college who was really smart and on a CS major track. At the time everybody used Borland C++, and some people's first exposure to C++ -- or programming in general -- was through this IDE. She asked me if her C++ classroom exercises would compile on a laptop. I said it should be fine. Then she said, "But isn't there like a chip or something in my desktop that compiles the programs?" I was a bit flabbergasted that anyone would think that, but simply replied that the compiler was just another piece of software that will run on any PC.
People come in to programming and they don't understand what's going on. A lot of details are hidden with development today. And it's great that we have the IDEs and so forth to help us not be bogged down in these details -- but a greater perspective is useful to any programmer, and that's why I and Charles Petzold and some other programmers recommend that your first, simple programs be done "the old fashioned way".
(Come to think of it though, maybe if there were a compilation chip -- an FPGA or something -- the compilation times of C++ and Rust could be mitigated...)
Or just build in the terminal with:
cc hello.c -o hello
I prefer this setup because it is more 'transparent' than a 'fat IDE' like Visual Studio, Xcode or CLion, but YMMV of course :)