Is There a Difference Between a Virtual Machine and a Code Sample?

I've been working on a textbook understanding software dynamics. The whole book is there's code samples, but you need to compile them with GCC and then measure the output. I said it would be a tremendous amount of work to convert any book over to this format. So I just decided I'm going to go overboard here and make this book interactive in kind of the most shining example of the sort of thing that I can imagine.