Wednesday 14 October 2009

Welcome!

Hi there, and welcome to this weblog, which is all about the internals of programming on a GNU/Linux system. There's already a wealth of material on how to program in C/C++, and of course on Linux - so that's not what this blog is about.

When I started programming in C, there was lots of information on the syntax of the language, and so on, but information was stark on things like the compile-assemble-link process, let alone what a shared/static library actually is and how to make one, and so on. All programming books gave me was just enough to compile a program ("you need to include both example1.c and example2.c on the command-line"), but I wanted a much more in-depth understanding, and that's something I had to scrape together and work out for myself.

So this blog is about the compilation chain, linkage, object files, symbol tables, and how to really use tools like ld, ar, nm, objdump, strip and so forth to program in a GNU/Linux environment. I managed to get by for a while without really understanding any of this, but there's only so far you can get without knowing how these things work.

In short: This blog is about all the things I wish someone had told me about programming when I started.

Hopefully you'll find some use for this, or at least find it interesting.

Thanks for reading!

1 comment:

  1. Hi,
    just wanted to say I find it interesting to read about how others deal with compiling c++ on linux. I recently started learning autotools and coding c++ with emacs. I think I need at least 2 years to handle it reasonably. So, let's see ...
    Bye.

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