Which Compiler for Study.com's Programming in C????

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Based on some previous posts it looks like I should avoid Dev C++ (which is too bad because I like the IDE).

Any idea what compiler the graders at Study.com typically use?

Would the best/safest bet be GCC? If so can anyone also recommend a lightweight IDE? By "lightweight" I mean anything that is faster and less of a memory hog than Visual Studio 

I'm pretty sure that the evaluators use GCC in both instances, so I ended up using GCC/C++ (technically LLVM/clang) for both my SL C++ and SDC C Programming courses and didn't have any problems.

Both are free and easy to set up as well. I use a Mac so the compiler is native, but I'd set up a virtual machine running Linux if I were going to do this on my Windows PC.

The vm running linux on a windows box is a good idea. 
Would downloading Dev C++  and replacing the old Mingw with a more current build be reasonable?