{"id":521,"date":"2021-12-21T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/?p=521"},"modified":"2023-04-12T19:43:03","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T03:43:03","slug":"toolchain-requirements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/?p=521","title":{"rendered":"Definition of a Toolchain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In software development a toolchain is a group of programs or utilities used to create an application or library for a given computer language. Developers traditionally refer to their build tools, compilers, and linkers as the components of a toolchain. Other programs or utilities like debuggers, sanitizers, or profilers, may also be considered as part of a toolchain.  This is not an exact term but any tool that is required to create, build, and deploy your software could fall under the umbrella of a toolchain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Project generator or Configuration Tool<ul><li>Reads a configuration file and gathers information about the computer system the user is building on, then generates project build files.  <\/li><li>Examples: cmake, autotools, meson, bazel <\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Build Tools<ul><li>A build tool reads the project build files and generates the necessary commands to call other tools to build the program.<\/li><li>Examples: ninja, make, msbuild<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Compilers<ul><li>A compiler is used to transform source code into a compiled object format.<\/li><\/ul><ul><li>Examples: clang, gcc, MinGW (Windows), MSVC (Windows)<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Linkers<ul><li>A linker is used to combine the compiled object files and libraries into a binary format or executable.<\/li><li>Examples: ld, lld<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Shell Environment<ul><li>Will always be present on Unix systems<\/li><li>Examples: bash, zsh<\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Debugger<ul><li>A debugger is used to inspect the values of variables defined in the source code at runtime. <\/li><li>Examples: gdb, lldb, windbg, Visual Studio <\/li><\/ul><\/li><li>Sanitizers<ul><li>Utilities to detect known incorrect code like buffer overflows, accessing a nullptr, or different types of undefined behavior which may be present in your code base.<\/li><li>Examples: address sanitizer (asan), memory sanitizer (msan), thread sanitizer (tsan)<\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In software development a toolchain is a group of programs or utilities used to create an application or library for a given computer language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2294,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions\/2294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.copperspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}