Also cool to play around with are the various options that let GCC (and presumably LLVM) show you the various compilation stages of your C code. You can even s

Also cool to play around with are the various options that let GCC (and presumably LLVM) show you the various compilation stages of your C code. You can even spit out the C and resulting assembly side-by-side. I haven't had the time to play with this, but Part 4 of the excellent "Unix as IDE" series [1] goes into it and I'm sure there's more around the web. Another really fun way to get into the underlying assembler that the C compiler generates is Vidar Hokstad's "Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up" [2]. This series involves writing little C functions, compiling them to the simplest assembly you can get, then writing a ruby compiler (in Ruby!) that emits that assembly. Some people have objections to the approach, but it's really quite nifty. I especially like it because it's really refreshing to see a compiler tutorial that doesn't start with the lexer and parser. [1] http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/unix-as-ide-compiling/ http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/unix-as-ide-compiling/ [2] http://www.hokstad.com/compiler http://www.hokstad.com/compiler