Could you compile a program manually?
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
Oh, I see... You're new here... Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
You have exceeded your one-silly-question-a-day-in-the-Lounge limit.
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
Brandon T. H. wrote:
Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand?
Only in a Chinese Room.
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
You could, but why?
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
No reason you couldn't compile something by hand, but it wouldn't be a good use of your time. If you really must write binary code and see the end product you'd be much better off writing a C-like compiler and writing relatively high level code and compiling it automatically. Writing this stuff in C as opposed to machine code or binary would be orders of magnitude faster. Judging by a quick look at your profile, along with your previous similar question, it looks like you're trying to write your own OS of sorts - you might like to take a look at Minix[^] which is a simplified Unix OS - I had to choose part of it to rewrite for my degree, so it's not too hard to take a look at and work out how things like drivers work. As a side note, does anybody else ever feel like they're channelling the MS paperclip? "It looks like you're trying to write a letter", "It looks like you're trying to write an Operating System" Hope this helps, Chris
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Oh, I see... You're new here... Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
:thumbsup: :laugh:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
Brandon T. H. wrote:
Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand?
Yes (well duh, computers can't compute anything that humans can't, they're just faster at it), and it's not even that hard (just time-consuming). Converting whatever-language source to assembly? Piece of cake. Assembling by hand? Conceptually simple, only requires looking things up in a table. Putting it in the right executable format? Ok that one is a little tricky to get right, but also not that hard.
Brandon T. H. wrote:
If so, could you point to some documents?
Sure. For x86+windows: Intel manuals[^] ModRM encoding (on sandpile.org)[^] PE 101[^]
Brandon T. H. wrote:
Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd"
I see no reason why this should be impossible.
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
Here's a more generic solution: Everything a computer does is manipulating numbers through a handful of basic operations (i.e. arithmetic, like addition/subtraction, and logic, like and, or, etc.), and move them around in memory. If you can manage those things then you can do anything a computer can do, it will just be much slower if you do. From a more mathematical stand point, any modern computer can be modeled as a Turing Machine[^], and you should be able to do everything a Turing machine can (of course, you won't have access to an infinite tape but this task is not infinite so you should be fine there). So to sum it up: if your computer can, you can too.
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
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No reason you couldn't compile something by hand, but it wouldn't be a good use of your time. If you really must write binary code and see the end product you'd be much better off writing a C-like compiler and writing relatively high level code and compiling it automatically. Writing this stuff in C as opposed to machine code or binary would be orders of magnitude faster. Judging by a quick look at your profile, along with your previous similar question, it looks like you're trying to write your own OS of sorts - you might like to take a look at Minix[^] which is a simplified Unix OS - I had to choose part of it to rewrite for my degree, so it's not too hard to take a look at and work out how things like drivers work. As a side note, does anybody else ever feel like they're channelling the MS paperclip? "It looks like you're trying to write a letter", "It looks like you're trying to write an Operating System" Hope this helps, Chris
When I look at some of the pie-in-the-sky news items about things like automatic parallelization, I get the sense that we are alarmingly close to the day when an animated character in an IDE says things like "it looks like you're trying to write an OS." I think this kind of thing is an example of what I call the "Hero Anti-Pattern," in which one supposedly brilliant developer abstracts everything (garbage collection, parallelization, "plumbing" code...) away from the rest of us. My gut tells me that self-proclaimed geniuses toiling away in a vacuum will probably never really keep the rest of us from having to worry about whatever it is they're trying to fix. Instead, what results is that these people get to shape the future of development, and rake in the concomitant glory and cash, while the rest of us just end up doing the same tasks (albeit in Hero-ized form).
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Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
I've done a lot of hand-assembly, i.e. translating assembly language into machine language (raw numbers). This ends up being very mechanical. There's not much thought involved. As far as hand-compilation of higher-level language code goes, that's somewhat mechanical, too, and most people with CS degrees will have done some of this as a part of their education. One of my articles[^] relies pretty heavily on hand-compiled C code, although I must also note that I artificially constrained my use of C to certain features, to make this chore easier.
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Oh, I see... You're new here... Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand? If so, could you point to some documents? Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd" (depending whether you are developing for a non-NT or NT Windows operating system)?
Simple Thanks and Regards, Brandon T. H. Programming in C and C++ now, now developing applications, services and drivers (and maybe some kernel modules...psst kernel-mode drivers...psst). Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison
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When I look at some of the pie-in-the-sky news items about things like automatic parallelization, I get the sense that we are alarmingly close to the day when an animated character in an IDE says things like "it looks like you're trying to write an OS." I think this kind of thing is an example of what I call the "Hero Anti-Pattern," in which one supposedly brilliant developer abstracts everything (garbage collection, parallelization, "plumbing" code...) away from the rest of us. My gut tells me that self-proclaimed geniuses toiling away in a vacuum will probably never really keep the rest of us from having to worry about whatever it is they're trying to fix. Instead, what results is that these people get to shape the future of development, and rake in the concomitant glory and cash, while the rest of us just end up doing the same tasks (albeit in Hero-ized form).
-
Oh, I see... You're new here... Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
Brandon T. H. wrote:
Is there some way to process a source-to-executable like a computer by hand?
Yes (well duh, computers can't compute anything that humans can't, they're just faster at it), and it's not even that hard (just time-consuming). Converting whatever-language source to assembly? Piece of cake. Assembling by hand? Conceptually simple, only requires looking things up in a table. Putting it in the right executable format? Ok that one is a little tricky to get right, but also not that hard.
Brandon T. H. wrote:
If so, could you point to some documents?
Sure. For x86+windows: Intel manuals[^] ModRM encoding (on sandpile.org)[^] PE 101[^]
Brandon T. H. wrote:
Could you also compile a device driver source to ".sys" or ".vxd"
I see no reason why this should be impossible.
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Yes, you just need to convert each line of source code into its object code equivalent. Once you have done that you build it into a binary file with a hex editor and, hey presto, Robert's your mother's brother.
One of these days I'm going to think of a really clever signature.
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When I look at some of the pie-in-the-sky news items about things like automatic parallelization, I get the sense that we are alarmingly close to the day when an animated character in an IDE says things like "it looks like you're trying to write an OS." I think this kind of thing is an example of what I call the "Hero Anti-Pattern," in which one supposedly brilliant developer abstracts everything (garbage collection, parallelization, "plumbing" code...) away from the rest of us. My gut tells me that self-proclaimed geniuses toiling away in a vacuum will probably never really keep the rest of us from having to worry about whatever it is they're trying to fix. Instead, what results is that these people get to shape the future of development, and rake in the concomitant glory and cash, while the rest of us just end up doing the same tasks (albeit in Hero-ized form).
Aren't we already almost there? VS: "File/New/ASP.NET MVC Project" or "File/New/Entity Model." Eclipse: "File/New/Java Package" Most modern IDE's abstract away so much boiler plate code that we have acheived almost the equivalent of Clippy already. Newcomers, such as myself, begin to believe that that's all there is to it. The "run" button, which in reality "builds" such projects then executes the build result, optionally stepping through in an integrated debugger, removes a whole lot behind-the-scenes operations. While all of these are great for productivity, and in many cases represent the ultimate goal of code re-use, they also deprive (for a time, anyway) us of the need to learn how these hidden parts of the process work.
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Oh, I see... You're new here... Take this sage advice in the spirit in which it's given - don't be a dork.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997Sage advice... Pssh. Ya junior code snot. I'm glad I'm not the only assembler dork out there. This is the sort of question asked by people who end up designing the compilers you all use.