What is a Runtime Environment?

Any code regardless of language apart from machine code needs to interact with the machine code of the system. It needs the infrastructure to connect to the processor and the memory. This takes the form of resources needed to make something happen.

A Runtime environment regardless is such a tool that allows the user to run some higher level language on our hardwares.

For the sake of this course, the language is JavaScript. When we write some code in it, we need the machine to give us some resources and infrastructure to start utilizing that code. One such popular runtime environment is NodeJS.

All runtime environments have their own quirks, specialties, and features. But we are only going to be focusing on one environment.

To clarify what this environment allows the developer to do is the following. You can use Javascript to write functions and modules for various web services. And then NodeJS is able to run your code to create servers for your application whether that be a local project or a network enterprise level application.

For any code that you may have, once you have installed node on your system can be run using

node filename.js