149

I have been seeing the words binary and source release in many websites download sections.

What do they actually mean?

For example, I have seen this in Groovy download page.

My question is how they differ? Both tend to install Groovy, but what's the main difference?

bad_coder
  • 11,289
  • 20
  • 44
  • 72
Ant's
  • 13,545
  • 27
  • 98
  • 148

3 Answers3

156

A source release will be compiled on your own machine while a binary release must match your operating system.

source releases are more common on linux systems because linux systems can dramatically vary in cpu, installed library versions, kernelversions and nearly every linux system has a compiler installed.

binary releases are common on ms-windows systems. most windows machines do not have a compiler installed.

k3b
  • 14,517
  • 7
  • 53
  • 85
  • 2
    So it mean that source installtion take time right! because it need to compile before installtion? And what happen if the user pc doen't have the source code compiler, in that case the user have to search for the compiler which can be tedious task. So is that binary is good? – Ant's Mar 12 '11 at 06:17
  • 2
    @Anto Aravinth "So is that binary is good?" **Yes for crossplatform** (windows/linux) because the developper cannot compile for any platform. **No for windows-systems** – k3b Mar 12 '11 at 06:23
  • 10
    If the application provider has already compiled appropriate binary version for your machine type and operating system, then I would say that binary version is better since it requires less work from you to start using it. On the other hand, if you know what you are doing, pretty much all compilers have different optimization parameters that you can tweak to make the application better optimized for your needs. – Harri Mar 12 '11 at 06:23
48

Binary releases contain computer readable version of the application, meaning it is compiled. Source releases contain human readable version of the application, meaning it has to be compiled before it can be used.

Harri
  • 2,692
  • 2
  • 21
  • 25
18

The source release is the raw, uncompiled code. You could read it yourself. To use it, it must be compiled on your machine. Binary means the code was compiled into a machine language format that the computer can read, then execute. No human can understand the binary file unless its been dissected, or opened with some program that let's you read the executable as code.

spinach
  • 311
  • 2
  • 9
  • What about transpiling from typescript to es5. Minification and uglifying javascript for example. Are these finished code files ready for web-serving considered source or binary? Technically you can still read the code, it's not binary in the sense most people mean binary. – Post Impatica Jan 30 '17 at 18:09
  • @Helzgate Other name for transpiling is source to source compilation. – charlie_pl Oct 23 '17 at 07:27