OK, I remember there was a thread on the forum about getting the free IDE to work with C++, it's been a while now. IIRC it was just an option somewhere although I thought you had to point the IDE to your own makefile but maybe not. Either way the GCC compiler was the same.
I actually had a big winge to NXP about the fact that you had to pay for C++ when on other platforms like Arduino it was the default and free. Next thing I know I get asked to beta test the latest (at the time) IDE with C++ support, but by then I had lost interest.
Rob