Learning to Program

Runtime Environment

You already learned that your source code needs to be transformed into binary for the computer to understand it, and you might have guessed that each programming language has its own way of performing that transformation. Did you know that you have to install a programming language? Without installing the programming language (or, more correctly, an implementation of the programming language), the transformation from source code to binary will never happen and your code will never execute. As you are writing your code, you need a place for it to execute—a runtime environment. For JavaScript, the web browser is the most common runtime environment. For many languages, the IDE is also the runtime environment. For some languages, ...