Development environment

The development environment is where the modeler actually writes programs that use Swarm. This can be anything from a simple line editor, to a programmable editing environment like Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs), to a Java development environment like JBuilder (http://www.borland.com/jbuilder).

One nice feature of more advanced development environments is that they bring together the editing environment with the debugger, so that you can see your code run, line by line.

Debugging can also be done from the command-line (e.g. in bash) by running gdb (http://www.gnu.org/manual/gdb-4.17/html_node/gdb_toc.html).

We provide Emacs on the Swarm CD-ROM because it is freely redistributable and can be used for Java or Objective C. Emacs knows how to interpret `make' and compiler output, and can manage the debugger.