There are a lot of terms that are frequently used when discussing development tools. Most of the common terms have been used for many different concepts such that their meanings have become ambiguous to the point of being confusing. Typically, we only guess at their meanings from context and we frequently guess wrong. This document uses very few terms by comparison. The intent is to make the concepts as clear as possible in order to convey the usage and intent of these tools.
Programs run on machines .
Programs are very nearly always written in source . Programs are built from source. Compilation is a process that is frequently, but not always, used when building programs. In this document, the word host refers to the environment in which the source in question will be compiled. Instead they refer to things like sun4 and dec3100 .