Here is a bird's-eye view of a computer program execution
All these three components are intertwined together and learning their connections is crucial in understanding what makes Computing possible. Informally, a language is a structured text with syntax and semantics. A Source Code written in a programming language needs a translator/compiler of some sort, to translate it to another language/format. Then an executor of some sort, to execute/run the translated commands with the goal of matching the syntax (and semantics) to some form of output.
Elements of Computing
Instructions and the Machine Language
If you want to create a "computer" from scratch, you need to start by defining an abstract model for your computer. This abstract model is also referred to as Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) (instruction set or simply instructions). A CPU is an implementation of such ISA. A standard ISA defines its basic elements such as data types, register values, various hardware supports, I/O etc. and they all make up the lowest-level language of computing which is the Machine Language Instructions.
Instructions are comprised of instruction code (aka operation code, in short opcode or p-code) which are directly executed by CPU. An opcode can either have operand(s) or no operand. For example, in an 8-bits machine where instructions are 8-bits an opcode load might be defined by the 4-bits 0011 following by the second 4-bits as operand with 0101 that makes up the instruction 00110101 in the Machine Language while the opcode for incrementing by 1 of the previously loaded value could be defined by 1000 with no operand.
Since opcodes are like atoms of computing, they are presented in an opcode table. An example of that is Intel x86 opcode table.
Assembly Language
Since it's hard to remember the opcodes by their bit-patterns, we can assign abstract symbols to opcodes matching their operations by name. This way, we can create Assembly language from the Machine Language. In the previous Machine Language example above, 00110101 (means load the binary 0101), we can define the symbol LOAD referring to 0011 as a higher level abstraction so that 00110101 can be written as LOAD 0101.
The utility program that translates the Assembly language to Machine Language is called Assembler.
Compiler
Compiler is any program that translates (maps, encodes) a language A to language B. Each compiler has two major components
- Frontend: deals with mapping the source code string to a structured format called Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
- Backend (code generator): translates the AST into the Bytecode / IR or Assembly
Most often, when we talk about compiler, we mean Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiler where the translation happens before execution. Another form of translation is Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation where translation happens right at the time of the execution.
From the diagram above, to distinguish between a program that translates for example, Python to Assembly vs. Python to Java, the former is called compiler and the latter transpiler.
Relativity of low-level, high-level
Assembly is a high-level language compared to the Machine Language but is considered low-level when viewing it from C/C++/Rust. High-level and low-level are relative terms conveying the amount of abstractions involved.
Virtual Machine (VM)
Instructions are hardware and vendor specific. That is, an Intel CPU instructions are different from AMD CPU. A VM abstracts away details of the underlying hardware or operating system so that programs translated/compiled into the VM language becomes platform agnostic. A famous example is the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which translates/compiles Java programs to JVM language aka Java Bytecode. Therefore, if you have a valid Java Bytecode and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in your system, you can execute the Bytecode, regardless on what platform it was compiled on.
Bytecode
Another technique to translate a source code to Machine Code, is emulating the Instruction Set with a new (human friendly) encoding (perhaps easier than assembly). Bytecode is such an intermediate language/representation which is lower-level than the actual programming language that has been translated from and higher-level than Assembly language.
Stack Machine
Stack Machine is a simple model for a computing machine with two main components
- a memory (stack) array keeping the Bytecode instructions that supports
pushing andpoping instructions - an instruction pointer (IP) and stack pointer (SP) guiding which instruction was executed and what is next.
Intermediate Representation (IR)
Any representation that's between source code and (usually) Assembly language is considered an intermediate representation. Mainstream languages usually have more than one such representations and going from one IR to another IR is called lowering.
Code Generation
Code generation for a compiler is when the compiler converts an IR to some Machine Code. But it has a wider semantic too for example, when using Rust declarative macro via macro_rules! to automate some repetitive implementations, you're essentially generating codes (as well as expanding the syntax).
Conclusion
In conclusion, we want to settle one of the most frequently asked questions
Is Python (or a language X) Compiled or Interpreted?
This is in fact the WRONG question to ask!
Being AOT compiled, JIT compiled or interpreted is implementation-dependent. For example, the standard Python implementation is CPython which compiles a Python source code (in CPython VM) to CPython Bytecode (contents of .pyc) and interprets the Bytecode. However, another implementation of Python is PyPy which (more or less) compiles a Python source code (in PyPy VM) to PyPy Bytecode and JIT compiles the PyPy Bytecode to the Machine Code (and is usually faster than CPython interpreter).