In all three languages, production of an executable file involves up to three steps, outlined below and in Figure 16.1, “Compilation”.

You generally do not need to run these steps individually. They are executed automatically in sequence when you run a compiler such as cc, clang, gcc, or gfortran.

Figure 16.1. Compilation

Every Unix system with a C compiler has a cc command. On FreeBSD and OS X, cc is equivalent to clang. On Linux systems, cc is equivalent to gcc. On some commercial Unix systems, cc is a proprietary compiler developed by the vendor. Clang/LLVM and GCC are both open source compiler suites and are highly compatible with each other. They support most of the same command-line flags, such as -Wall to enable all possible warning messages.

Unfortunately, there is no standard compiler name for Fortran, since most Unix system don't include a Fortran compiler. Fortran is usually added in the form of f2c (a Fortran 77 to C translator), gfortran (the open source GNU Fortran compiler), or flang (the open source Clang/LLVM Fortran compiler). There are also several commercial Fortran compilers available.

C source files have an extension of ".c". C++ files usually use ".cc", ".cpp", ".cxx", or ".c++".

Fortran files use ".f", ".F", ".for", or ".FOR" for Fortran 77, ".f90" or ".F90" for Fortran 90, ".f03" or ".F03" for Fortran 2003, and ".f08" or ".F08" for Fortran 2008.

Examples of building an executable file from a single source file:

shell-prompt: cc jumping-genes.c
shell-prompt: gfortran gauss.f90
            

The commands above will produce an executable file called a.out. This is the default for most Unix compilers. The executable file is also sometimes called a binary file. This is why program directories on Unix systems are named "bin" (/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc.)

To run the binary program, we simply type it's file name followed by any arguments that it requires.

shell-prompt: ./a.out
            

Most Unix compilers also support the -o flag to specify a different output file name.

shell-prompt: cc jumping-genes.c -o jumping-genes
shell-prompt: ./jumping-genes
shell-prompt: gfortran gauss.f90 -o gauss
shell-prompt: ./gauss
            

All Unix compilers support certain common flags. The -g tells the compiler to include debugging information in the binary file, so that a debugger (a program that helps you find problems) can determine the location of a problem in the source code while examining an executable. The -O, -O2 and -O3 flags tell the compiler to turn on standard levels of object code optimization.

shell-prompt: cc -O2 jumping-genes.c -o jumping-genes
shell-prompt: gfortran -O3 gauss.f90 -o gauss
            

You can keep your life simple by compiling with cc, rather than specifically using clang or gcc, and using portable flags such as -O. The -Wall flag is not entirely portable, but is supported by both clang and gcc, which are by far the most popular compilers. Compiling with -Wall is extremely helpful for catching potential program bugs.

Using -O will usually improve the speed of your executable file significantly and will often reduce its size as well. The -O2 will usually offer only a marginal improvement over -O (and is actually the same with some compilers), and -O3 will usually provide little or no benefit over -O2.

Higher optimization levels like -O3 may also impede debugging, since they may reorganize the machine code in ways that make it impossible to determine which line of source code a given machine instruction came from. Generally, the higher the level of optimization, the more dangerous and less beneficial the optimizations will be. Using -O will include all optimizations considered to be very safe and will provide the vast majority of all the performance benefit that's possible.

You can also enable specific optimizations using other command line flags, but such flags may not work with all compilers and may produce executables that will not run on older CPUs of the same family. The -O flags all aim to generate portable executables that will run on any machine in the same family of processors that is likely to still be in use. For example, compiling with -O2 on the latest AMD or Intel processor will generate an executable that should work on any recent Intel or AMD processor produced in the last several years.

In rare cases, you may see noticeably better performance by utilizing the latest processor features. Clang and GCC make this relatively easy with the -march=native flag:

shell-prompt: clang -O2 -march=native super-analyzer.c
            

For most programs, this will make very little difference in speed. In extremely rare cases, it may reduce run time by as much as 30%. The executable produced will not work on older processors, however. You also need to be using a compiler that is new enough to support all or your bleeding-edge processor's features.

Before committing to anything more sophisticated than -O2, compare the run time of your program when compiled with various options to see if it's really worth doing. This can be easily done using the time command, as discussed in the section called “Time”.

Libraries, as mentioned above, are collections of precompiled subprograms that we can use in our programs. Libraries are built with the same compilers as our programs (cc, c++, gfortran, flang, etc). We can create our own libraries as described in Chapter 21, Subprograms. More often, we will use libraries supplied with the compiler or installed via a package manager.

While all languages use libraries, the C language was intentionally designed to rely heavily on them. The C language designers decided not to give the language any features that could be implemented as a library function. This keeps the language very simple, fast, easy to learn, and easy to implement on new hardware. In some cases it makes the program a bit less elegant, but no harder to read in reality.

For example, to compare two strings in many languages, we might write something like the following:

if ( string1 == string2 )
            

The C language does not directly support string comparison, so for this we use a library function call:

if ( strcmp(string1, string2) == 0 )
            

Some libraries, such as the standard C library (usually /usr/lib/libc.so) are automatically searched by the linker.

For other libraries, such as the standard math library (usually /usr/lib/libm.so) we need to tell the linker to search it, by using the -l flag. This flag is immediately followed by the unique portion of the library's file name. For example, to use libm.so, we specify -lm. To use liblzma.so, we would specify -llzma.

cc -O gauss.c -o gauss -lm -llzma
            

All library file names begin with "lib" and end with common extensions like ".a", ".so", or ".dylib". We omit these parts when using the -l flag.

Add-on libraries, such as those installed by a package manager, may not be in the linker's default search path, so we also need to use -L to tell the linker where to find the library file. This flag is immediately followed by the absolute or relative path of the directory containing the library. For example, to use /usr/local/lib/libblas.a, we would use a compile command like the following:

cc -O gauss.c -o gauss -L/usr/local/lib -lblas -lm
gfortran -O gauss.f90 -o gauss -L/usr/local/lib -lblas -lm
            

The compilation process for C++ or Fortran is largely the same as for C. C++ also uses a preprocessor stage. Preprocessing was not part of the original Fortran language, but it has been adopted from C. Fortran compilers can be told to use the C preprocessor by specifying command-line options such as -cpp or by choosing an appropriate filename extension such as .fpp.

C, C++ and Fortran object files are slightly different from each other, but can be linked together to form executables from multiple languages. It is actually quite common for C++ programs to use C libraries, and for C/C++ programs to use Fortran libraries such as BLAS.

C++ programs can be compiled on any system using the c++ command, which is equivalent to clang++ on FreeBSD and macOS, and to g++ on GNU/Linux systems. There is rarely a reason to invoked clang++ or g++ explicitly.

# C++ program using Fortran BLAS library and C math library
shell-prompt: c++ super-analyzer.cxx -L/usr/local/lib -lblas -lm
            

The most stable Fortran compiler is gfortran. The Flang project aims to develop an open source Fortran compiler companion to clang and clang++, but is still a work-in-progress at the time of this writing. Commercial Fortran compilers also exist. At the time of this writing, Fortran compilers are not as compatible with each other as are clang and gcc, so invoking gfortran directly may be the best option.