What is runtime

The goal of TechTerms. We strive for simplicity and accuracy with every definition we publish. If you have feedback about the Runtime definition or would like to suggest a new technical term, please contact us. Want to learn more tech terms? Subscribe to the daily or weekly newsletter and get featured terms and quizzes delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe or change your frequency setting at any time using the links available in each email.

By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Machine Intelligence. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Runtime has a responsibility of allocating memory , freeing memory , using operating system's sub system like File Services, IO Services.. Network Services etc. Runtime basically means when program interacts with the hardware and operating system of a machine. C does not have it's own runtime but instead, it requests runtime from an operating system which is basically a part of ram to execute itself.

I found that the following folder structure makes a very insightful context for understanding what runtime is:. It's contents are like:. So eg. And then you get the runtime of that implementation, to use it and to build upon it. That is, with a little polarisation, the runnable files that the users of your new C-based program will need. As a developer of a C-based program, so do you, but you need the C compiler and the C library headers, too; the users don't need those.

The fully qualified name of Runtime seems to be the additional environment to provide programming language-related functions required at run time for non-web application software. Runtime implements programming language-related functions, which remain the same to any application domain, including math operations, memory operations, messaging, OS or DB abstraction service, etc.

The runtime must in some way be connected with the running applications to be useful, such as being loaded into application memory space as a shared dynamic library, a virtual machine process inside which the application runs, or a service process communicating with the application.

Historically it comes from slow mainframe environment where machine-time was expensive. Run time is the instance where you don't know about of what type of objects creates during its execution, objects creation are based on certain condition or some computation work. In contradict, compile time is the instance where required objects are defined by you before its executions. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. What is "runtime"? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 1 month ago. Active 1 month ago. Viewed k times. What is " runtime " exactly? What is it made of? How does it interact with my code? Or maybe more precisely, how is my code controlled by it? Here's the quotation that leads to such thought: This compilation process is sufficiently complex to be broken into several layers of abstraction, and these usually involve three translators: a compiler, a virtual machine implementation, and an assembler.

Improve this question. Th runtime contains the runtime library plus some control code and and some state supplied by the OS. Great question, always questioned this. I found another post on a sister site that may be useful: programmers.

I always thing of it like a sandbox to lower level infrastructure. All that is part of the runtime. The foundations on which things are built. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. James e. James k 39 39 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I think "especially those instructions that you did not write explicitly" is not a helpful distinction; whether you yourself wrote a line of code, or the compiler brought it in from a library that someone else wrote, has nothing to do with the distinction of compile time vs runtime.

By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Machine Intelligence. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us.