LinuxFocus: GCC – The Root of All

“Can you imagine compiling Free software with a closed source,
proprietary compiler? How do you know what’s going into your
executable? There could be any kind of back door or Trojan. Ken
Thompson, in one of the great hacks of all time, wrote a compiler
that left a back door in the ‘login’ program and perpetuated the
trojan when the compiler realized it was compiling itself. Read his
description of this all time classic here. Luckily, we have
gcc.

“Whenever you do a configure; make; make install gcc does a lot
of heavy lifting behind the scenes. How do we make gcc work for us?
We will start writing a card game, but we will only write as much
as we need to to demonstrate the compiler’s functionality. Since
we’re starting from scratch, it takes an understanding of the
compile process to know what needs to be done to make an executable
and in what order. We will look at the general overview of how a C
program gets compiled and the options that make gcc do what we want
it to do. The steps (and the tools that do them) are Pre-compile
(gcc -E), Compile (gcc), Assembly (as), and Link (ld)…”

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