Cygwin is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operating systems to be compiled and run on Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications.
In computing, the Executable and Linkable Format is a common standard file format for executable files, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. First published in the specification for the application binary interface (ABI) of the Unix operating system version named System V Release 4 (SVR4), and later in the Tool Interface Standard, it was quickly accepted among different vendors of Unix systems. In 1999, it was chosen as the standard binary file format for Unix and Unix-like systems on x86 processors by the 86open project.
In computing, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files and combines them into a single executable file, library file, or another "object" file.
Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
The Binary File Descriptor library (BFD) is the GNU Project's main mechanism for the portable manipulation of object files in a variety of formats. As of 2003, it supports approximately 50 file formats and 25 instruction set architectures.
MinGW, formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications.
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils.
Buffer overflow protection is any of various techniques used during software development to enhance the security of executable programs by detecting buffer overflows on stack-allocated variables, and preventing them from causing program misbehavior or from becoming serious security vulnerabilities. A stack buffer overflow occurs when a program writes to a memory address on the program's call stack outside of the intended data structure, which is usually a fixed-length buffer. Stack buffer overflow bugs are caused when a program writes more data to a buffer located on the stack than what is actually allocated for that buffer. This almost always results in corruption of adjacent data on the stack, which could lead to program crashes, incorrect operation, or security issues.
LLVM, also called LLVM Core, is a target-independent optimizer and code generator. It can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine, though the project has expanded and the name is no longer officially an initialism.
readelf is a program for displaying various information about object files on Unix-like systems, similar to objdump. It is part of the GNU binutils.
The GNU Assembler, commonly known as gas or as, is the assembler developed by the GNU Project. It is the default back-end of GCC. It is used to assemble the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel, and various other software. It is a part of the GNU Binutils package.
Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.
David Stephen Miller is an American software developer working on the Linux kernel, where he is the primary maintainer of the networking subsystem and individual networking drivers, the SPARC implementation, and the IDE subsystem. With other people, he co-maintains the crypto API, KProbes, IPsec, and is also involved in other development work.
Mathomatic is a free, portable, general-purpose computer algebra system (CAS) that can symbolically solve, simplify, combine and compare algebraic equations, and can perform complex number, modular, and polynomial arithmetic, along with standard arithmetic. It can perform symbolic calculus (derivative, extrema, Taylor series, and polynomial integration and Laplace transforms), numerical integration, and can handle all elementary algebra except logarithms. Trigonometric functions can be entered and manipulated using complex exponentials, with the GNU m4 preprocessor. Not currently implemented are general functions such as f(x), arbitrary-precision and interval arithmetic, as well as matrices.
In Unix, Plan 9, and Unix-like operating systems, the strip program is a command-line utility used to remove non-essential information from executable binary programs and object files. This information, which is not required for execution, typically includes debugging data, symbol tables, relocation information, and other metadata. Its primary purpose is to reduce the file size of the binary executable and potentially increase performance. The output of this process is known as a stripped binary.
objdump is a command-line program for displaying various information about object files on Unix-like operating systems. For instance, it can be used as a disassembler to view an executable in assembly form. It is part of the GNU Binutils for fine-grained control over executables and other binary data. objdump uses the BFD library to read the contents of object files. Similar utilities are Borland TDUMP, Microsoft DUMPBIN and readelf.
The GNU Binary Utilities, or binutils, is a collection of programming tools maintained by the GNU Project for working with executable code including assembly, linking and many other development operations.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries—most of which are provided by third parties—to create a complete operating system, designed as a clone of Unix and released under the copyleft GPL license.
Mingw-w64 is a free and open-source suite of development tools that generate Portable Executable (PE) binaries for Microsoft Windows. It was forked in 2005–2010 from MinGW.
