Originally Posted by
green granite
If you want
real performance you use Machine code for the absolute fastest or Assembler as second fastest executing code
These days a compiler is likely to produce better code than an average assembler programmer unless you can use special instructions that the compiler won't generate (e.g. AES-NI). Otherwise there are so many different special cases for instruction scheduling that the compiler is more likely to get it right than a programmer who hasn't invested the time to learn about them.
More on topic, I'd agree with the others who've suggested downloading the free versions of Visual Studio; I haven't used them in a few years, but the older versions did just about everything that I needed to on Windows. For more arcane languages, Linux probably has a free compiler.
Right now Java and C# seem to be the big languages for PC development, with C++ declining. All three are fairly similar, but C++ is far more verbose and slower to compile... the upside is better performance when the program is running, but PCs are so fast these days that often you won't even notice.