Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Chapter 3. The Runtime View of a Program

Chapter 1, “Build System Overview,” took a high-level view of the build process, originating with an untouched source code tree and ending with a software package installed on the target machine. Before looking at each of these build steps in detail, you should learn more about what you’re actually building. That is, what does a program look like when it runs inside the target machine, and what are all the disk files that the target machine needs to load into memory?

To fully understand the sequence of steps the build system performs, you need to visualize the program’s runtime view. Seeing how your program will be loaded into memory and executed makes it easier to determine which object files, executable ...