

With an understanding of how compilers work, you'll be able to write source code that they can translate into elegant machine code.

The types of machine code statements that compilers typically generate for common control structures, so you can choose the best statements when writing HLL code.How to analyze the output of a compiler to verify that your code does, indeed, generate good machine code.

In this second volume of the Write Great Code series, you'll learn: The result is often sloppy, inefficient code.īut you don't need to give up the productivity and portability of high-level languages in order to produce more efficient software. Today, however, many programmers write in high-level languages like Python, C/C++/C#, Java, Swift. Early programmers were sparing in their use of high-level language code, knowing that a high-level language compiler would generate crummy, low-level machine code for their software. In the beginning, most software was written in assembly, the CPU's low-level language, in order to achieve acceptable performance on relatively slow hardware. Explains how compilers translate high-level language source code (like code written in Python) into low-level machine code (code that the computer can understand) to help readers understand how to produce the best low-level, computer readable machine code.
