The toolchain
We will use a set of tools to transform a high-level language (yes, I wrote that, C is a high-level language) into the binary code that the chip understands and is laid out in a file that it can execute. To make it short, it's called compilation (compilation is actually one step of it, but it is a quite easy shorthand). We will push this file to the chip and have it run our code. In order to do that, we will have to use a set of tools and I will describe these in the following sections.
The compilation process
Under the generic compilation concept, the way it is understood by most people, we turn the code into something that can be executed by a computer. From the push of a button or a sternly typed command line, we see a file appear that we can run (a .exe
file, a .elf
file, or other formats). In reality, this is (of course) a little bit more complicated.
The compilation in itself
The goal of the compilation process is to turn a human-readable language...