54 lines
3.0 KiB
HTML
54 lines
3.0 KiB
HTML
|
<p>Firstly, a very blessed Easter Sunday to all! I would've liked to
|
||
|
|
write an Easter Sunday post, but I do not have a topic planned. Alas,
|
||
|
|
it'll have to wait for another year.</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>Now let's get into the topic of this post: Editors, compilers, and
|
||
|
|
build systems. It somewhat bothers me that many university students are
|
||
|
|
unaware of this distinction. They have a vague idea, but are unable to
|
||
|
|
pin it down. This is primarily because professors make a point of using
|
||
|
|
IDEs from the start. As such, some have come to believe that you require
|
||
|
|
a special program (e.g. Eclipse for Java) in order to write code for a
|
||
|
|
given language. This limits them severely in their software development,
|
||
|
|
since they restrict themselves to the tools which the IDE provides them
|
||
|
|
with. Instead, especially in a university where it's supposed that one
|
||
|
|
learns the foundational knowledge and concepts of a given field, it
|
||
|
|
would make more sense to teach students these concepts as separate tools
|
||
|
|
first, before <em>allowing them</em> to use these all-in-one IDE
|
||
|
|
solutions.</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>I suppose that most of my readers will either know the difference
|
||
|
|
already, or are not very tech-savvy and probably have no idea what I'm
|
||
|
|
talking about. But I am going to go over the difference between these
|
||
|
|
anyways.</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>An <em>editor</em> is a tool that is used to edit a plain text file.
|
||
|
|
That is, any editor can read & write any file written by any other
|
||
|
|
editor because it's nothing but ASCII text. These editors can be simple,
|
||
|
|
(e.g. nano) or they can be more complex (e.g. VIM, VSCode), containing
|
||
|
|
all kinds of features which make editing code easier (e.g. syntax
|
||
|
|
highlighting, linters, autocompletion).</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>A <em>compiler</em> is a tool used to turn code written with the
|
||
|
|
editor into a binary that can be read by the machine (or by a virtual
|
||
|
|
machine, as in the case of Java). One need not use any particular
|
||
|
|
compiler for any particular editor. The compiler one wishes to use
|
||
|
|
depends on the programming language, and the target platform.</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>A <em>build system</em> is a tool which can be understood like a kind
|
||
|
|
of <i>script</i> which helps to figure out what compiler commands to
|
||
|
|
run, and makes compiling an entire project much easier. That is, instead
|
||
|
|
of writing every single compiler command for every source file manually,
|
||
|
|
one can simple run the build system and it will run these automatically.
|
||
|
|
There exist some build systems which are language-dependent (e.g.
|
||
|
|
Maven), but there are many others which are mostly language-agnostic
|
||
|
|
(e.g. Makefile, CMake, Ninja).</p>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<p>Despite this, I do not wish to make out IDEs to be an inherently bad
|
||
|
|
thing. For although I personally have been using (Neo)Vim for about 5
|
||
|
|
years now, and am very content with it, I recognize that for many an
|
||
|
|
integrated development environment (IDE) may be the more productive tool
|
||
|
|
for their particular use. But I believe that being able to discriminate
|
||
|
|
between these different components, which in an IDE are integrated into
|
||
|
|
one single tool, is vital for proper project management and
|
||
|
|
collaboration with others who may not want to use the same tools.</p>
|