Understanding the C Compilation Process

Manoj — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:20:42 +0000

This article grew out of my journey to revisit C from a systems perspective. Most of my career has been in Notes/Domino, Java, and Drupal, and although I learned C during my university years, I never used it extensively in practice. Lately, my curiosity has pushed me to return to the fundamentals and understand what really happens beneath the surface. This article is for anyone who shares that same curiosity—those who want to peek under the hood and see what truly happens when we hit compile.

This article is the first entry in a learning packet I’m putting together called What Happens to Your C Program When It’s Compiled. We begin with the preprocessing stage—the starting point of the compilation process.

Hosted on GitHub:

Understanding the C Compilation Process — Part I: Preprocessing

Understanding Complement Arithmetic: Why Computers Subtract by Adding.

Manoj — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:02:23 +0000

Thirty years after first learning 2’s complement, I revisited it — not just to remember how it works, but to understand why it works. What I found was a surprisingly elegant bridge between 17th-century mechanical calculators and modern binary arithmetic.

If you’ve ever wondered why flipping bits and adding one turns subtraction into addition, this deep dive might surprise you.

🔗 Read the full packet: “Subtraction Through Addition: The Power of Complements

Hosted on GitHub:
Understanding Complement Arithmetic

DEV Community: Manoj

Understanding the C Compilation Process

Understanding Complement Arithmetic: Why Computers Subtract by Adding.