I am reading "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective". Topic: stages of compilation in C Preprocessing phase, Compilation phase, Assembly phase and Linker phase. In Assembly phase this line "This file (the object file) is a binary file containing 17 bytes to encode the instructions for function main." I can't understand what the "17 bytes to encode the instructions mean".
1 Answers
Without entering in much detail, the result of the compilation is stored in object files. Then, after compiling that function main, the result are 17 bytes that are stored in the object file. It says 'encode' because the compiler is "translating" from C++ language to another, which normally is machine code. Depending on the compiler and the target machine/environment you want to compile for, those 17 bytes will probably be different.
Related