When you start Notepad on Windows or the Terminal on Linux, you actually are telling the processor to run an executable of that program. The executable is the finished product that can be run and should do what the programmer intended to achieve.
Steps to Generating an Executable
Writing a C++ program is a first step towards creating an executable that can eventually run on your operating system. The basic steps in creating applications in C++ are the following:
- Writing (or programming) C++ code using a text editor
- Compiling code using a C++ compiler that converts it to a machine language version contained in "object files"
- Linking the output of the compiler using a linker to get an executable (.exe in Windows, for example)
