This article is part of the sequence The Basics You Won't Learn in the Basics aimed at eager people striving to gain a deeper understanding of programming and computer science.
When I wrote my first program, my trainer told me I merely wrote the source code. Now, I have to translate it to a language understandable by computers. We call that compilation. It happens by clicking Ctrl+F5 (In Visual Studio). And there you have it, your program is now an executable. That's how they initially thought me what the build process of a program is. And that is a good enough explanation for beginners. But at one point, I realized that when I click Ctrl+F5, some processes happen behind the scenes which we don't see. Those processes we will explore in today's article. And did you know, that when you click Ctrl+F5, the processes used are different for different languages? Have you ever wondered why is it harder to code in C++ than it is in C#? Well, we won't be able to explore the whole details of the last question. That has a lot to do with language design and the decisions being taken during the years. But we will explore the fundamental difference between those languages. That difference lies in their build process. …
