By comparison with other plugs such as RadRails,
CDT is more mature. It is a full-functional developing environment. It is open-source and managed by eclipse.org.
After installing it to eclipse, you should install a c++ compiler. I use gnu provided by
cygwin. Maybe It is easiest approach to setup the environment in Windows. Then install g++ compiler, make and gdb in cygwin setup. At last add the cygwin/bin to system path, so you can invoke those library in eclipse. Eclipse don't provide an entry to configure which compiler you want to use as do for jdk. But I think there is some way to change the compiler to your favorite one.
(Later I tested it in linux, and I found that the compile process was much more quickly than in Windows.)
In evaluating CDT, you will find that only after you has compiled your code, then you will get some error. But eclipse will analyse the result from compiler and can point out at which line in code maybe there is an error. Will done! But the hint is some confused and javac will give us more information.
There is a nice feature: when you save your code, eclipse will build or make the project automatically. Some like the way done in java.
In summary, if you will develop c++ code with gnu compiler or in linux environment, CDT is a good choice.