The building process

All source code is held in ASCII text files. The process by which these files are transformed into an executable program consisting of machine code instructions is called building. A program may involve many source files written in many different languages. Some of the code may already be pre-compiled into libraries, against which the program must be linked. Handling the whole process may be a nontrivial task, and is therefore an important part of the programming knowledge. To a program we associate a project, which loosely speaking is a workspace containing everything that is needed to build the program.

The stages for building a project are as follows.

• Creating a directory for your project(s) mkdir directoryName
• Entering the directory cd directoryName
• Creating/editing the C++ program
• Building the source
• Debugging the program/project
• Packaging/distribution (Makefiles, READMEs, documentation...)