Choosing Your Development Environment

Depending on your operating system, you can build programs from the command line and/or from an IDE such as Microsoft Visual Studio* (Windows* OS) or Xcode* (Mac OS* X).

An IDE offers a number of ways to simplify the task of compiling and linking programs. It provides a default text editor. You can also use your favorite text editor outside the integrated development environment.

Because software development is an iterative process, it is important to be able to move quickly and efficiently to various locations in your source code. If you use an IDE to build your programs, you can display both the description of the error message and the relevant source code directly from the displayed error messages.

When you build programs from the command line, you may have more control of the build tools. If you choose to, you can customize how your program is built by your selection of compiler and linker options. Compiler options are described in the Compiler Options Reference.

See Also