Integrated development environment
software application used to develop software
An integrated development environment (IDE) is software that provides a relatively comprehensive set of features for software development. An IDE is intended to enhance productivity by providing development features with a consistent user experience as opposed to using separate tools, such as vi, GDB, GCC, and make.
At a minimum, an IDE typically supports source-code editing, source control, build automation, and debugging. An IDE may include support for integrating tools such as
a compiler, runtime environment or version control system, but sometimes such tools are bundled with the IDE. Some IDEs provide special support for constructing a graphical user interface (GUI). Many IDEs support object-oriented programming via features such as class browser and object browser. Typically, an IDE provides special support for one or more programming languages, allowing for features tailored to a language. Some IDEs can be extended to support additional languages.
Although some IDEs are implemented as an application, some are implemented as a library, often designed for a particular software platform. For example, although Eclipse is a platform for which there are many plugins that each provide an IDE experience, the core application does not.
While modern IDEs are GUI-based, there were IDEs before the availability of windowing systems like Windows and the X Window System.
“Integrated development environment” enters the record as software application used to develop software. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Integrated, development and environment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13741. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Integrated development environment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.