Piyesh, I totally agree. The bar is much higher than for Java, C# and the more recent generation of languages. The answer here is changing your tooling:

For an IDE I use Netbeans C++ and with a bit of persuasion Google Test for unit testing direct from the IDE. You don’t need to bother with make et al. for project maintenance, Netbeans takes the strain there.

Storing your code in GitHub means building with Travis is easy and linking to a service like coveralls is also simple for kick-ass coverage reports.

If you really want GC then Boehm is a good place to start — I like dealing with new/delete again (well RAII really) so I’ve not tried it with the standard library.

I’ve had really good performance results using Google’s tcmalloc compared to the standard allocator. Switching to it is about the easiest performance gain you’ll ever get.

Compiler-wise clang can’t be beaten for warning/error message generation. It is genuinely impressive. GCC gets the performance honours tho, at least in my applications use case.