Every time you write a program and hit run, something extraordinary happens before a single instruction executes. Your source code,the plain text(human-readable), gets transformed through several distinct stages into something a CPU can actually understand.
Most developers never look at those stages. They trust the compiler the way they trust electricity: they know it works, they just don't know how.
This article is about how it works.
By the end, you'll understand every major stage a compiler goes through, what it's doing and why, and you'll never look at a compiler error the same way again.
What Is a Compiler, Really?
