neraliu's blog internet profession in between hongkong/china and silicon valley (no longer, but the world!)

understanding the whole process of generating an executable from source code

The linker actually enables separate compilation. As shown in Figure w.3, an executable can be made up of a number of source files which can be compiled and assembled into their object files respectively, independently.notes: this article is copied from the following links as a study note of myself in computer science

this module presents quite a detail story of a process (running program). however, it is an excerpt from more complete notes from Tenouk's buffer overflow tutorial. it tries to investigate how the c/c++ source codes preprocessed, compiled, linked and loaded as a running program. it is based on the gcc. when you use the ide compilers such as microsoft visual c++, borland c++ builder etc. the processes discussed here quite transparent. the commands and examples of the gcc, gdb, gas and friends are discuss in here1, here2.

c compiler ability: