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Integrated Development Environment (IDE) ○꠹｜Definition｜1st｜20251119205401-00-⌔
Integrated development environment - Wikipedia
Integrated development environment
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.1
While modern IDEs are GUI-based, there were IDEs before the availability of windowing systems like Windows and the X Window System. For example, Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS has a full-screen, text-based user experience.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Eclipse is often called an IDE since it was originally and still is today commonly installed with the Java IDE plugin. The plugins provide development environments. With no plugins enabled, the Eclipse application does not provide an experience that includes the typical, basic features of an integrated development environment. ↩
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