Assembly code vs Machine code vs Object code

Question

What is the difference between object code  machine code and assembly code   Can you give a visual example of their difference

User · Answer

8B 5D 32 is machine code  mov ebx   ebp 32h  is assembly  lmylib so containing 8B 5D 32 is object code

User · Answer

Machine code is binary  1 s and 0 s  code that can be executed directly by the CPU  If you open a machine code file in a text editor you would see garbage  including unprintable characters  no  not those unprintable characters       Object code is a portion of machine code not yet linked into a complete program  It s the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product  It may also contain placeholders or offsets not found in the machine code of a completed program  The linker will use these placeholders and offsets to connect everything together  Assembly code is plain-text and  somewhat  human read-able source code that mostly has a direct 1 1 analog with machine instructions  This is accomplished using mnemonics for the actual instructions  registers  or other resources  Examples include JMP and MULT for the CPU s jump and multiplication instructions  Unlike machine code  the CPU does not understand assembly code  You convert assembly code to machine code with the use of an assembler or a compiler  though we usually think of compilers in association with high-level programming language that are abstracted further from the CPU instructions   Building a complete program involves writing source code for the program in either assembly or a higher level language like C    The source code is assembled  for assembly code  or compiled  for higher level languages  to object code  and individual modules are linked together to become the machine code for the final program  In the case of very simple programs the linking step may not be needed  In other cases  such as with an IDE  integrated development environment  the linker and compiler may be invoked together  In other cases  a complicated make script or solution file may be used to tell the environment how to build the final application  There are also interpreted languages that behave differently  Interpreted languages rely on the machine code of a special interpreter program  At the basic level  an interpreter parses the source code and immediately converts the commands to new machine code and executes them  Modern interpreters are now much more complicated  evaluating whole sections of source code at a time  caching and optimizing where possible  and handling complex memory management tasks  One final type of program involves the use of a runtime-environment or virtual machine  In this situation  a program is first pre-compiled to a lower-level intermediate language or byte code  The byte code is then loaded by the virtual machine  which just-in-time compiles it to native code  The advantage here is the virtual machine can take advantage of optimizations available at the time the program runs and for that specific environment  A compiler belongs to the developer  and therefore must produce relatively generic  less-optimized  machine code that could run in many places  The runtime environment or virtual machine  however  is located on the end user s computer and therefore can take advantage of all the features provided by that system

User · Answer

I think these are the main differences   readability of the code control over what is your code doing   Readability can make the code improved or substituted 6 months after it was created with litte effort  on the other hand  if performance is critical you may want to use a low level language to target the specific hardware you will have in production  so to get faster execution   IMO today computers are fast enough to let a programmer gain fast execution with OOP

User · Answer

Machine code is binary  1 s and 0 s  code that can be executed directly by the CPU  If you open a machine code file in a text editor you would see garbage  including unprintable characters  no  not those unprintable characters       Object code is a portion of machine code not yet linked into a complete program  It s the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product  It may also contain placeholders or offsets not found in the machine code of a completed program  The linker will use these placeholders and offsets to connect everything together  Assembly code is plain-text and  somewhat  human read-able source code that mostly has a direct 1 1 analog with machine instructions  This is accomplished using mnemonics for the actual instructions  registers  or other resources  Examples include JMP and MULT for the CPU s jump and multiplication instructions  Unlike machine code  the CPU does not understand assembly code  You convert assembly code to machine code with the use of an assembler or a compiler  though we usually think of compilers in association with high-level programming language that are abstracted further from the CPU instructions   Building a complete program involves writing source code for the program in either assembly or a higher level language like C    The source code is assembled  for assembly code  or compiled  for higher level languages  to object code  and individual modules are linked together to become the machine code for the final program  In the case of very simple programs the linking step may not be needed  In other cases  such as with an IDE  integrated development environment  the linker and compiler may be invoked together  In other cases  a complicated make script or solution file may be used to tell the environment how to build the final application  There are also interpreted languages that behave differently  Interpreted languages rely on the machine code of a special interpreter program  At the basic level  an interpreter parses the source code and immediately converts the commands to new machine code and executes them  Modern interpreters are now much more complicated  evaluating whole sections of source code at a time  caching and optimizing where possible  and handling complex memory management tasks  One final type of program involves the use of a runtime-environment or virtual machine  In this situation  a program is first pre-compiled to a lower-level intermediate language or byte code  The byte code is then loaded by the virtual machine  which just-in-time compiles it to native code  The advantage here is the virtual machine can take advantage of optimizations available at the time the program runs and for that specific environment  A compiler belongs to the developer  and therefore must produce relatively generic  less-optimized  machine code that could run in many places  The runtime environment or virtual machine  however  is located on the end user s computer and therefore can take advantage of all the features provided by that system

User · Answer

I think these are the main differences   readability of the code control over what is your code doing   Readability can make the code improved or substituted 6 months after it was created with litte effort  on the other hand  if performance is critical you may want to use a low level language to target the specific hardware you will have in production  so to get faster execution   IMO today computers are fast enough to let a programmer gain fast execution with OOP

User · Answer

I think these are the main differences   readability of the code control over what is your code doing   Readability can make the code improved or substituted 6 months after it was created with litte effort  on the other hand  if performance is critical you may want to use a low level language to target the specific hardware you will have in production  so to get faster execution   IMO today computers are fast enough to let a programmer gain fast execution with OOP

User · Answer

Source code  Assembly code  Machine code  Object code  Byte code  Executable file and Library file  All these terms are often very confusing for most people for the fact that they think they are mutually exclusive  See the diagram to understand their relations  The description of each term is given below     Source code Instructions in human readable  programming  language  High-level code Instructions written in a high level  programming  language e g    C  C   and Java programs  Assembly code Instructions written in an assembly language  kind of low-level programming language   As the first step of the compilation process  high-level code is converted into this form  It is the assembly code which is then being converted into actual machine code  On most systems  these two steps are performed automatically as a part of the compilation process  e g   program asm  Object code The product of a compilation process  It may be in the form of machine code or byte code  e g   file o  Machine code Instructions in machine language  e g   a out  Byte code Instruction in an intermediate form which can be executed by an interpreter such as JVM  e g   Java class file  Executable file The product of linking  proccess  They are machine code which can be directly executed by the CPU  e g   an  exe file  Note that in some contexts a file containing byte-code or scripting language instructions may also be considered executable   Library file Some code is compiled into this form for different reasons such as re-usability and later used by executable files

User · Answer

Assembly code is a human readable representation of machine code   mov eax  77 jmp anywhere   Machine code is pure hexadecimal code   5F 3A E3 F1   I assume you mean object code as in an object file  This is a variant of machine code  with a difference that the jumps are sort of parameterized such that a linker can fill them in   An assembler is used to convert assembly code into machine code  object code  A linker links several object  and library  files to generate an executable   I have once written an assembler program in pure hex  no assembler available  luckily this was way back on the good old  ancient  6502  But I m glad there are assemblers for the pentium opcodes

User · Answer

The source files of your programs are compiled into object files  and then the linker links those object files together  producing an executable file including your architecture s machine codes   Both object file and executable file involves architecture s machine code in the form of printable and non-printable characters when it s opened by a text editor   Nonetheless  the dichotomy between the files is that the object file s  may contain unresolved external references  such as printf  for instance   So  it may need to be linked against other object files   That is to say  the unresolved external references are needed to be resolved in order to get the decent runnable executable file by linking with other object files such as C C   runtime library s

User · Answer

The source files of your programs are compiled into object files  and then the linker links those object files together  producing an executable file including your architecture s machine codes   Both object file and executable file involves architecture s machine code in the form of printable and non-printable characters when it s opened by a text editor   Nonetheless  the dichotomy between the files is that the object file s  may contain unresolved external references  such as printf  for instance   So  it may need to be linked against other object files   That is to say  the unresolved external references are needed to be resolved in order to get the decent runnable executable file by linking with other object files such as C C   runtime library s

User · Answer

One point not yet mentioned is that there are a few different types of assembly code   In the most basic form  all numbers used in instructions must be specified as constants   For example     1902  BD 37 14   LDA  1437 X  1905  85 03      STA  03  1907  85 09      STA  09  1909  CA         DEX  190A  10         BPL  1902   The above bit of code  if stored at address  1900 in an Atari 2600 cartridge  will display a number of lines in different colors fetched from a table which starts at address  1437   On some tools  typing in an address  along with the rightmost part of the line above  would store to memory the values shown in the middle column  and start the next line with the following address   Typing code in that form was much more convenient than typing in hex  but one had to know the precise addresses of everything   Most assemblers allow one to use symbolic addresses   The above code would be written more like    rainbow lp    lda ColorTbl x   sta WSYNC   sta COLUBK   dex   bpl rainbow lp   The assembler would automatically adjust the LDA instruction so it would refer to whatever address was mapped to the label ColorTbl   Using this style of assembler makes it much easier to write and edit code than would be possible if one had to hand-key and hand-maintain all addresses

User · Answer

Machine code is binary  1 s and 0 s  code that can be executed directly by the CPU  If you open a machine code file in a text editor you would see garbage  including unprintable characters  no  not those unprintable characters       Object code is a portion of machine code not yet linked into a complete program  It s the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product  It may also contain placeholders or offsets not found in the machine code of a completed program  The linker will use these placeholders and offsets to connect everything together  Assembly code is plain-text and  somewhat  human read-able source code that mostly has a direct 1 1 analog with machine instructions  This is accomplished using mnemonics for the actual instructions  registers  or other resources  Examples include JMP and MULT for the CPU s jump and multiplication instructions  Unlike machine code  the CPU does not understand assembly code  You convert assembly code to machine code with the use of an assembler or a compiler  though we usually think of compilers in association with high-level programming language that are abstracted further from the CPU instructions   Building a complete program involves writing source code for the program in either assembly or a higher level language like C    The source code is assembled  for assembly code  or compiled  for higher level languages  to object code  and individual modules are linked together to become the machine code for the final program  In the case of very simple programs the linking step may not be needed  In other cases  such as with an IDE  integrated development environment  the linker and compiler may be invoked together  In other cases  a complicated make script or solution file may be used to tell the environment how to build the final application  There are also interpreted languages that behave differently  Interpreted languages rely on the machine code of a special interpreter program  At the basic level  an interpreter parses the source code and immediately converts the commands to new machine code and executes them  Modern interpreters are now much more complicated  evaluating whole sections of source code at a time  caching and optimizing where possible  and handling complex memory management tasks  One final type of program involves the use of a runtime-environment or virtual machine  In this situation  a program is first pre-compiled to a lower-level intermediate language or byte code  The byte code is then loaded by the virtual machine  which just-in-time compiles it to native code  The advantage here is the virtual machine can take advantage of optimizations available at the time the program runs and for that specific environment  A compiler belongs to the developer  and therefore must produce relatively generic  less-optimized  machine code that could run in many places  The runtime environment or virtual machine  however  is located on the end user s computer and therefore can take advantage of all the features provided by that system

User · Answer

Assembly code is discussed here    An assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers  It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture    Machine code is discussed here    Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a computer s central processing unit    Basically  assembler code is the language and it is translated to object code  the native code that the CPU runs  by an assembler  analogous to a compiler

User · Answer

Assembly is short descriptive terms humans can understand that can be directly translated into the machine code that a CPU actually uses   While somewhat understandable by humans  Assembler is still low level  It takes a lot of code to do anything useful   So instead we use higher level languages such as C  BASIC  FORTAN  OK I know I ve dated myself   When compiled these produce object code  Early languages had machine language as their object code   Many languages today such a JAVA and C  usually compile into a bytecode that is not machine code  but one that easily be interpreted at run time to produce machine code

User · Answer

8B 5D 32 is machine code  mov ebx   ebp 32h  is assembly  lmylib so containing 8B 5D 32 is object code

User · Answer

Assembly code is discussed here    An assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers  It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture    Machine code is discussed here    Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a computer s central processing unit    Basically  assembler code is the language and it is translated to object code  the native code that the CPU runs  by an assembler  analogous to a compiler

User · Answer

Assembly code is a human readable representation of machine code   mov eax  77 jmp anywhere   Machine code is pure hexadecimal code   5F 3A E3 F1   I assume you mean object code as in an object file  This is a variant of machine code  with a difference that the jumps are sort of parameterized such that a linker can fill them in   An assembler is used to convert assembly code into machine code  object code  A linker links several object  and library  files to generate an executable   I have once written an assembler program in pure hex  no assembler available  luckily this was way back on the good old  ancient  6502  But I m glad there are assemblers for the pentium opcodes

User · Answer

Machine code is binary  1 s and 0 s  code that can be executed directly by the CPU  If you open a machine code file in a text editor you would see garbage  including unprintable characters  no  not those unprintable characters       Object code is a portion of machine code not yet linked into a complete program  It s the machine code for one particular library or module that will make up the completed product  It may also contain placeholders or offsets not found in the machine code of a completed program  The linker will use these placeholders and offsets to connect everything together  Assembly code is plain-text and  somewhat  human read-able source code that mostly has a direct 1 1 analog with machine instructions  This is accomplished using mnemonics for the actual instructions  registers  or other resources  Examples include JMP and MULT for the CPU s jump and multiplication instructions  Unlike machine code  the CPU does not understand assembly code  You convert assembly code to machine code with the use of an assembler or a compiler  though we usually think of compilers in association with high-level programming language that are abstracted further from the CPU instructions   Building a complete program involves writing source code for the program in either assembly or a higher level language like C    The source code is assembled  for assembly code  or compiled  for higher level languages  to object code  and individual modules are linked together to become the machine code for the final program  In the case of very simple programs the linking step may not be needed  In other cases  such as with an IDE  integrated development environment  the linker and compiler may be invoked together  In other cases  a complicated make script or solution file may be used to tell the environment how to build the final application  There are also interpreted languages that behave differently  Interpreted languages rely on the machine code of a special interpreter program  At the basic level  an interpreter parses the source code and immediately converts the commands to new machine code and executes them  Modern interpreters are now much more complicated  evaluating whole sections of source code at a time  caching and optimizing where possible  and handling complex memory management tasks  One final type of program involves the use of a runtime-environment or virtual machine  In this situation  a program is first pre-compiled to a lower-level intermediate language or byte code  The byte code is then loaded by the virtual machine  which just-in-time compiles it to native code  The advantage here is the virtual machine can take advantage of optimizations available at the time the program runs and for that specific environment  A compiler belongs to the developer  and therefore must produce relatively generic  less-optimized  machine code that could run in many places  The runtime environment or virtual machine  however  is located on the end user s computer and therefore can take advantage of all the features provided by that system

User · Answer

Assembly is short descriptive terms humans can understand that can be directly translated into the machine code that a CPU actually uses   While somewhat understandable by humans  Assembler is still low level  It takes a lot of code to do anything useful   So instead we use higher level languages such as C  BASIC  FORTAN  OK I know I ve dated myself   When compiled these produce object code  Early languages had machine language as their object code   Many languages today such a JAVA and C  usually compile into a bytecode that is not machine code  but one that easily be interpreted at run time to produce machine code

User · Answer

Assembly code is discussed here    An assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers  It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture    Machine code is discussed here    Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a computer s central processing unit    Basically  assembler code is the language and it is translated to object code  the native code that the CPU runs  by an assembler  analogous to a compiler

User · Answer

Assembly code is discussed here    An assembly language is a low-level language for programming computers  It implements a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture    Machine code is discussed here    Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a computer s central processing unit    Basically  assembler code is the language and it is translated to object code  the native code that the CPU runs  by an assembler  analogous to a compiler

User · Answer

I think these are the main differences   readability of the code control over what is your code doing   Readability can make the code improved or substituted 6 months after it was created with litte effort  on the other hand  if performance is critical you may want to use a low level language to target the specific hardware you will have in production  so to get faster execution   IMO today computers are fast enough to let a programmer gain fast execution with OOP

User · Answer

8B 5D 32 is machine code  mov ebx   ebp 32h  is assembly  lmylib so containing 8B 5D 32 is object code

User · Answer

Assembly is short descriptive terms humans can understand that can be directly translated into the machine code that a CPU actually uses   While somewhat understandable by humans  Assembler is still low level  It takes a lot of code to do anything useful   So instead we use higher level languages such as C  BASIC  FORTAN  OK I know I ve dated myself   When compiled these produce object code  Early languages had machine language as their object code   Many languages today such a JAVA and C  usually compile into a bytecode that is not machine code  but one that easily be interpreted at run time to produce machine code

User · Answer

One point not yet mentioned is that there are a few different types of assembly code   In the most basic form  all numbers used in instructions must be specified as constants   For example     1902  BD 37 14   LDA  1437 X  1905  85 03      STA  03  1907  85 09      STA  09  1909  CA         DEX  190A  10         BPL  1902   The above bit of code  if stored at address  1900 in an Atari 2600 cartridge  will display a number of lines in different colors fetched from a table which starts at address  1437   On some tools  typing in an address  along with the rightmost part of the line above  would store to memory the values shown in the middle column  and start the next line with the following address   Typing code in that form was much more convenient than typing in hex  but one had to know the precise addresses of everything   Most assemblers allow one to use symbolic addresses   The above code would be written more like    rainbow lp    lda ColorTbl x   sta WSYNC   sta COLUBK   dex   bpl rainbow lp   The assembler would automatically adjust the LDA instruction so it would refer to whatever address was mapped to the label ColorTbl   Using this style of assembler makes it much easier to write and edit code than would be possible if one had to hand-key and hand-maintain all addresses

User · Answer

The other answers gave a good description of the difference  but you asked for a visual also   Here is a diagram showing they journey from C code to an executable

User · Answer

Source code  Assembly code  Machine code  Object code  Byte code  Executable file and Library file  All these terms are often very confusing for most people for the fact that they think they are mutually exclusive  See the diagram to understand their relations  The description of each term is given below     Source code Instructions in human readable  programming  language  High-level code Instructions written in a high level  programming  language e g    C  C   and Java programs  Assembly code Instructions written in an assembly language  kind of low-level programming language   As the first step of the compilation process  high-level code is converted into this form  It is the assembly code which is then being converted into actual machine code  On most systems  these two steps are performed automatically as a part of the compilation process  e g   program asm  Object code The product of a compilation process  It may be in the form of machine code or byte code  e g   file o  Machine code Instructions in machine language  e g   a out  Byte code Instruction in an intermediate form which can be executed by an interpreter such as JVM  e g   Java class file  Executable file The product of linking  proccess  They are machine code which can be directly executed by the CPU  e g   an  exe file  Note that in some contexts a file containing byte-code or scripting language instructions may also be considered executable   Library file Some code is compiled into this form for different reasons such as re-usability and later used by executable files

User · Answer

Assembly is short descriptive terms humans can understand that can be directly translated into the machine code that a CPU actually uses   While somewhat understandable by humans  Assembler is still low level  It takes a lot of code to do anything useful   So instead we use higher level languages such as C  BASIC  FORTAN  OK I know I ve dated myself   When compiled these produce object code  Early languages had machine language as their object code   Many languages today such a JAVA and C  usually compile into a bytecode that is not machine code  but one that easily be interpreted at run time to produce machine code

User · Answer

The other answers gave a good description of the difference  but you asked for a visual also   Here is a diagram showing they journey from C code to an executable

User · Answer

8B 5D 32 is machine code  mov ebx   ebp 32h  is assembly  lmylib so containing 8B 5D 32 is object code

User · Answer

Assembly code is a human readable representation of machine code   mov eax  77 jmp anywhere   Machine code is pure hexadecimal code   5F 3A E3 F1   I assume you mean object code as in an object file  This is a variant of machine code  with a difference that the jumps are sort of parameterized such that a linker can fill them in   An assembler is used to convert assembly code into machine code  object code  A linker links several object  and library  files to generate an executable   I have once written an assembler program in pure hex  no assembler available  luckily this was way back on the good old  ancient  6502  But I m glad there are assemblers for the pentium opcodes

User · Answer

Assembly code is a human readable representation of machine code   mov eax  77 jmp anywhere   Machine code is pure hexadecimal code   5F 3A E3 F1   I assume you mean object code as in an object file  This is a variant of machine code  with a difference that the jumps are sort of parameterized such that a linker can fill them in   An assembler is used to convert assembly code into machine code  object code  A linker links several object  and library  files to generate an executable   I have once written an assembler program in pure hex  no assembler available  luckily this was way back on the good old  ancient  6502  But I m glad there are assemblers for the pentium opcodes

[assembly] Assembly code vs Machine code vs Object code?

Examples related to assembly

Examples related to machine-code

Examples related to object-code