Secure coding guidance may vary depending on whether code is hand-coded versus automatically generated. Categories of code include:
- Hand-coded - code that has been manually written by a programmer using a text editor or interactive development environment where the programmer maintains source code directly in the source code format which is provided to the compiler.
- Tool-generated, tool-maintained - code which is specified and maintained in a higher-level format, from which language specific source code is generated. The source code is generated from this higher level description and then provided as input to the language compiler. The generated source code is never viewed or modified by the programmer.
- Tool-generated, tool-maintained
- JIT compilation
- Interpreted execution
- Translated code