What is a command line compiler?

Question

What is a command line compiler?

Answer 1

Nowadays, you tend to have environments in which you develop code. In other words, you get an IDE (integrated development environment) which is comprised of an editor, compiler, linker, debugger and many other wonderous tools (code analysis, refactoring and so forth).

You never have to type in a command at all, preferring instead a key sequence like CTRLF5 which will build your entire project for you.

Not so in earlier days. We had to memorize all sorts of arcane commands to get our source code transformed into executables. Such beautiful constructs as:

cc -I/usr/include -c -o prog.o prog.c
cc -I/usr/include -c -o obj1.o obj1.c
as -o start.o start.s
ld -o prog -L/lib:/usr/lib prog.o obj1.o start.o -lm -lnet

Simple, no?

It was actually a great leap forward when we started using makefiles since we could hide all those arcane commands in a complex file and simply execute make from the command line. It would go away and perform all those commands for us, and only on files that needed it.

Of course, there's still a need for command-line compilers in today's world. The ability to run things like Eclipse in "headless" mode (no GUI) allow you to compile all your stuff in a batch way, without having to interact with the GUI itself.

In addition, both Borland (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) and Microsoft also provide command-line compilers for no cost (Microsoft also have their Express editions for free as well).

And gcc is also a command-line compiler. It does its one job very well and leaves it up to other applications to add a front end, if people need that sort of thing.

Don't get me wrong. I think the whole IDE thing is a wonderful idea for a quick code/debug cycle but I find that, once my applications have reached a certain level of maturity, I tend to prefer them in a form where I can edit the code with vim and just run make to produce the end product.

Answer 2

A command-line compiler is one that you run from the command line.

You type in gcc filename.c to compile a file (or something like that). Almost all compilers have a command-line version, and many have GUIs where you never see the command line, but the command line is still there. – Bill K Oct 5 at 16:27

(Bill K provided a nice answer in the comments... copied here and lightly edited by Mark Harrison, set to community wiki so as not to get rep.)