From Source to Binary
In programming, everything starts with source code. In reality, source code, which sometimes goes by the other name of the code base, usually consists of a number of text files. Within that, each of those text files contains textual instructions written in a programming language.
We know that a CPU cannot execute textual instructions. The reality is that these instructions should first be compiled (or translated) to machine-level instructions in order to be executed by a CPU, which eventually will result in a running program.
In this chapter, we go through the steps needed to get a final product out of C source code. This chapter goes into the subject in great depth, and as such we've split it into five distinct sections:
- The standard C compilation pipeline: In the first section, we are going to cover standard C compilation, the various steps in the pipeline, and how they contribute to producing the final product from C source...
