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By the time you've gotten some experience with writing software, you'll realize that doing everything in one source file is just not going to work. Kind of like keeping all your clothes in one big box - eventually the socks get lost at the bottom. Most programs are built from more than one source, with each source containing a "module" of functionality, usually self-contained so that you can work on it separately and (hopefully) test it separately also.
Another reason why you'd want to use multiple source files is so that you can write different parts of your program in different languages. For example, gcc uses C for most of its modules, but it uses bison to compile the grammar itself. Multiple sources also reduces your debugging cycle, because most of the sources will already be compiled when you go to rebuild your program after fixing that one last bug :-)
Anyway, the purpose of this part of the Guide is to help you figure out how to build a program that is made up of more than one source file.
The first thing you have to understand is the concept of a "global symbol". Symbols are things like function and variables. Global symbols are symbols that are known to the whole program. For example:
int c;
int foo(int x)
{
int y = x * 2 + 1 + c;
printf("foo(%d)=%d\n", x, y);
}
In this code snippet, the symbols c and foo are
global; c because it's a variable declared outside any
functions, and foo because it's a function that other parts
of the program will be able to use. There is another global symbol
here also - printf. Even though this snippet doesn't
define printf, it's still a symbol that this snippet
uses. The difference is that foo is defined by us and
printf is external to us.
Consider these two functions, each in their own source file:
int foo(int x) int bar(int j)
{ {
return bar(x) + 47; printf("j is %d\n", j);
} return j*j;
}
In this example, the file on the left defines the global symbol
foo and refers to the external symbol bar. The file
on the right, however, defines the global symbol bar and
refers to the external symbol printf.
When you compile these files to objects, by using "gcc -c foo.c" and "gcc -c bar.c" (go ahead and try it), the compiler doesn't yet know how it will resolve those references to symbols it doesn't know about it. What does it do? Pretty much nothing. It just writes down the missing information in the object file, and puts off the problem until later. When is later? Once you have all the files compiled, you link them all together. Unix calls this "loading", as in "load them all up into one program", hence the program that does this is called ld, even though gcc takes care of calling ld for you.
When you combine these objects together (along with the standard C library, which happens automatically), the linker (ld) makes a big list of all the global symbols in all the objects, defined and external. It matches up the references to the symbols with the definitions of them. If any are still missing, you get an error - an "unresolved external". If none are missing, you get a program!
One other thing that the linker does is make sure that no two files defined the same symbol. For example, no program can have two functions called foo - which would it use? This goes for variables also, which a lot of people stumble on. Consider these two files:
int size = 42; extern int size;In this example, the left file defines a variable size and the right file refers to the external variable size. When you link these together, everyone is happy. Now consider this:
int size = 42; int size;In this case, both files are defining the variable size, so when you link them, there's a problem. While this looks like an obvious problem, a lot of people put the definition in a header file, which is included in multiple source files, and inadvertently define it once in each file. Always use extern in header files! Remember, also, that extern alone won't define a symbol. At least one of the sources must have a definition for the variable as well.
OK, enough about symbols. How do you compile and link these files? Well, let's start with two source files, main.c and foo.c:
int main(void) int foo(int x)
{ {
printf("foo(4)=%d\n", foo(4)); return 2*x+1;
exit(0); }
}
OK, first we have to compile these files into objects. Use commands like
this:
gcc -c main.c gcc -c foo.c
You could have also done "gcc -c main.c foo.c", the results are the same. However, the two-command approach is better once you learn to use make to automate the compilations. The net result is that you have two new files in your directory, main.o and foo.o. These are the object files. Each contains the compiled versions of the sources, along with symbol tables and other information.
To see the symbol tables, try this command:
nm main.o foo.o
To build the final program, use gcc again:
gcc main.o foo.o -o main.exe
When you run main.exe, you'll see that it prints out the correct value! If it didn't, you could edit just one of the two files, recompile just that file, and just link the two objects at the end. While this doesn't seem like much of a savings, consider building gcc. It has hundreds of source files and takes 20 minutes to build from scratch. Editing and compiling just one source file takes less than a minute, including building the program. Quite a savings, eh?
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