Does compiler generate assembly or machine code?

14 Answers. gcc actually produces assembler and assembles it using the as assembler. Not all compilers do this – the MS compilers produce object code directly, though you can make them generate assembler output.

Why is assembly code better than machine code?

Assembly language is a low-level programming language . It equates to machine code but is more readable. It can be directly translated into machine code, but it uses mnemonics to represent the instructions to make it easier to understand.

What is the main difference between machine code and assembly code?

The main difference between machine code and assembly language is that the machine code is a language consisting of binaries that can be directly executed by a computer while an assembly language is a low-level programming language that requires a software called an assembler to convert it into machine code.

Why would you code in assembly?

Today, assembly language is used primarily for direct hardware manipulation, access to specialized processor instructions, or to address critical performance issues. Typical uses are device drivers, low-level embedded systems, and real-time systems.

Why do most compilers do not directly produce machine languages but rather they produce assembly languages instead?

6 Answers. Other reason for compilers to produce assembly rather than proper machine code are: The symbolic addresses used by assemblers instead of hard-coding machine addresses make code relocation much easier. Linking code may involve safety checks such as type-checking, and that’s easier to do with symbolic names.

What’s the difference between compiler and assembler?

The difference between compiler and assembler is that a compiler is used to convert high-level programming language code into machine language code. On the other hand, an assembler converts assembly level language code into machine language code. Whereas, the assembler, converts the code line by line.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of assembly language?

Advantages and Disadvantages

• It allows complex jobs to run in a simpler way.
• It is memory efficient, as it requires less memory.
• It is faster in speed, as its execution time is less.
• It is mainly hardware-oriented.
• It requires less instruction to get the result.
• It is used for critical jobs.

Why are machine code and assembly languages said to be machine oriented?

Both machine code and assembly languages are hardware specific and not portable. This means that the machine code used to run a program on one specific computer needs to be modified to run on another computer. Portable code in a high-level language can run on multiple computer systems without modification.

Is machine code faster than Assembly?

Actually, the short answer is: Assembler is always faster or equal to the speed of C. The reason is that you can have assembly without C, but you can’t have C without assembly (in the binary form, which we in the old days called “machine code”).

How is assembly language different from machine language?

Machine language is the low level programming language. Machine language can only be represented by 0s and 1s. Assembly language is the more than low level and less than high-level language so it is intermediary language. Assembly languages use numbers, symbols, and abbreviations instead of 0s and 1s.

Does a compiler always produce assembly code?

1 Related: Does a compiler always produce an assembly code?- no, big mainstream C compilers that provide a complete toolchain often go straight to machine code, especially ones (unlike GCC) that only target a few ISAs / object file formats. But yes, compilers with smaller dev teams often leave the object-file handling to an existing assembler.

What type of code is used to generate assembly language?

Generally, machine code. However, most compilers can be told to generate human-readable assembly language with a command-line switch. To pick one example, the GNU compiler suite generally takes a “-S” command line option to generate a “.s” (assembly source) file instead of an object file.

Is it possible to convert assembler code to object code?

Not all compilers do this – the MS compilers produce object code directly, though you can make them generate assembler output. Translating assembler to object code is a pretty simple process, at least compared with compilation.

How does a C++ compiler turn source code into machine code?

I have started learning C++, and I have learned that a compiler turns source code from a program into machine code through compilation. However, I’ve learned that C++ compilers actually translate the source code into Assembly as an interim step before translating the Assembly code into machine code.