Summary
In this chapter, we covered the fundamental steps and components required to build a C project. Without knowing how to build a project, it is pointless to just write code. In this chapter:
- We went through the C compilation pipeline and its various steps. We discussed each step and described the inputs and the outputs.
- We defined the term platform and how different assemblers can lead to different machine-level instructions for the same C program.
- We continued to discuss each step and the component driving that step in a greater detail.
- As part of the compiler component, we explained what the compiler frontends and backends are, and how GCC and LLVM use this separation to support many languages.
- As part of our discussion regarding the assembler component, we saw that object files are platform-dependent, and they should have an exact file format.
- As part of the linker component, we discussed what a linker does and how it uses symbols to find the missing...
