Go Tools: The Compiler — Part 1 Assembly Language and Go
The Go compiler is at the heart of Go’s build process, taking code and generating executables from that code. Go’s compiler is available for those interested to tinker with it using the go tool compiler command.
Assembly and the Assembler
Assembly is programming language meant to be understood by humans, and is often characterized as a low-level programming language. In some languages, the compiler generates assembly language. In most cases Assembly is the penultimate step in the hierarchy of programming abstractions before you know how to speak to the machine.
Assembly cannot be directly executed as machine code or by the host machine, and it needs an assembler (which is just another program) to be able to convert it into machine code. Assembly differs from machine code in that, assembly does not contain binaries, it cannot be directly executed by machine code and assembly is meant to be “human readable”. Typically as you ascend the hierarchy of programming abstractions. e.g. from high-level programming languages, to low-level ones, more emphasis is placed on interfacing with the actual characteristics of the architecture you’re running on. This arguably makes assembler highly relevant when pursuing performance or accessing low-level hardware functionality such as in embedded…
