C Compile Process

Source program is a sequence of bits, organized in 8-bit chunks called bytes

Modern systems represent text characters in ASCII or UTF-8

Sample Hello World program:

GCC compiler reads source and translates into executable object file, performed over four phases:

• Preprocessing - preprocessor (cpp) modifies the original C program according to directives (#), resulting in another C program ending with .i suffix.
• Compilation - compiler (cc1) translates text file hello.i into text file hello.s which contains assembly language program. Compilers generate the same assembly for a specific system, no matter the source language.
• Assembly - assembler (as) translates hello.s into machine language instructions, packages them in form known as relocatable object program, and stores result in hello.o
• Linking - the linker (ld) handles merging external library components to the object file. Result is hello file which is an executable object file.