The Stream Replaces The Assembly
The Stream Replaces The Assembly
Traditional compilation is a sprawling, multi-stage assembly line. A C file is fed to a preprocessor to expand macros, then to a compiler to generate assembly text, then to an assembler to parse that text into object code, and finally to a linker to resolve dependencies. Each step generates intermediate artifacts, requiring massive string manipulation and disk I/O.
The Plan 9 C compiler suite (qc, 6c, 8c) collapses the assembly line into a single stream.
There is no separate preprocessor pass. There is no intermediate assembly text generation. The compiler directly emits a stream of machine-dependent, binary intermediate object code. The linker then consumes this stream, performing global register allocation and dead-code elimination directly during the final layout.
By removing the intermediate textual representation, the process ceases to be a series of translations and becomes a single, continuous extrusion. The stream replaces the assembly.