HP-UX HB v13.00 Ch-11 - Software Development

HP-UX Handbook – Rev 13.00 Page 4 (of 101)

Chapter 11 Software Development

October 29, 2013

Preface

This chapter is intended to give an overview over issues on software development in general, and

on HP-UX in particular. It is not intended to teach programming languages, and if at all, only

basic skills in programming languages, and probably a little shell programming know-how are

required to understand its contents.

The Software Development chapter covers topics like building a program, program execution,

products and tools are available on HP-UX for software development, common problems and

approaches how to solve them.

The Build Process

The process to build an executable program consists basically of the following steps:

Source

Compiler

Object

Linker

Executable

A programmer writes a program in his preferred programming language. The program code is

stored in an ASCII file usually called the source file. Because the processor does not understand

programming languages, the source code must be converted into machine code. This is what the

compiler does. It creates the object file which contains the machine code and a table of contents

and references. Usually a program is made from multiple objects, each having contents and

references. The linker creates the executable from the objects by binding references to contents.

For easier creation of executables every compiler comes with a so-called front-end command. It

is used as a single interface to do one or more steps of the build process at once. It knows which

default parameters to pass to each build step to ease the creation of an executable program from a

source file.

The compiler front-ends know various input file types and distinguish them by their file name

extension. They will pass them directly to the appropriate sub-process:

File Type

Subprocess

Extensions

source files

preprocessor (if used by the

language)

C: .c

aC++: .C, .cc, .cpp, .cxx

Fortran: .f, .F, .f90

intermediate files

compiler

.i, .o

all other files

linker

any