CITS2002 Systems Programming  
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Compiling and linking our C programs

C programs are human-readable text files, that we term source-code files.

This makes them very easy to copy, read, and edit on different computers and different operating systems.
C is often described as being portable at the source-code level.

Before we can run (execute) our C programs, we must translate, or compile, their source-code files to files that the operating system can better manage.
A program known as a compiler translates (compiles) source-code files into object-code files.

Finally, we translate or link one or more object-code files to produce an executable program, often termed a 'binary', an 'executable', or an 'exe' file.
A program known as a linker performs this translation, also linking our object-code file(s) with standard libraries and (optionally) 3rd-party libraries.

compilation compiling

Depending on how we invoke the compiler, sometimes we can 'move' straight from the source-code files to the executable program, all in one step.
In reality the compiler is 'silently' executing the linker program for us, and then removing any unwanted object-files.

 

CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 2, p3, 25th July 2023.