There are Six Phases of C Program Development

Phase 1: Editor

 
Programmer creates program in the editor and stores it on disk.one of the text editor is vim which creates the c program files in Linux operating system.

Phase 2: Preprocessor

 
The c pre-processor is a macro processor that is used automatically by the c compiler to transform your program before actual compilation .

Phase 3: Compiler & interpreter

 
The compiler read the whole program and translated it into machine language completely.compiler needs syntactically correct program to produce an executable code.

Phase  4: Linker

 
Linker link the object code with the libraries creates an executable file and stores it on disk.

Phase 5: Loader

 
The process which loads the program into memory and then instruct the processor to start the execution of the program from the first instruction.

Phase 6: CPU

 
CPU takes each instruction and executes it.possibly storing new data values as the program executes.

This is typical c program development environment.