Development

The development environment is the environment in which changes to software are developed by us, i.e. the workstation of an individual developer. It differs from the final target environment in several ways - the target may not be a desktop computer (it may be a smartphone, an embedded system, a headless machine in a data centre, etc.), and even if it is otherwise similar, the developer's environment will contain development tools such as a compiler, an "integrated development environment", different or additional versions of libraries and supporting software, etc. that are not present in a user's environment.