Machine code

Machine code or machine language is a system of largely impartible instructions executed directly by a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction performs a very specific task, such as a load, a jump, or an ALU operation on a unit of data in a CPU register or memory. Every program directly executed by a CPU is made up of a series of such instructions.

Numerical machine code (i.e. not assembly code) may be regarded as the lowest-level representation of a compiled and/or assembled computer program or as a primitive and hardware-dependent programming language. While it is possible to write programs directly in numerical machine code, it is tedious and error prone to manage individual bits and calculate numerical addresses and constants manually. It is therefore rarely done today, except for situations that require rather extreme optimization or debugging.

Almost all practical programs today are written in higher-level languages or assembly language, and translated to executable machine code by a compiler and/or assembler and linker. Programs in interpreted languages^[1] are not translated into machine code, however, although their interpreter (which may be seen as an executor or processor) typically consists of directly executable machine code (generated from assembly and/or high level language source code).

Machine code should not be confused with so-called "bytecode" (or the older term p-code), which is either executed by an interpreter or itself compiled into machine code for faster (direct) execution. Machine code and assembly code is sometimes called native code when referring to platform-dependent parts of language features or libraries.^[2]

Machine code instructions

Every processor or processor family has its own machine code instruction set. Instructions are patterns of bits that by physical design correspond to different commands to the machine. The instruction set is thus specific to a class of processors using (much) the same architecture. Successor or derivative processor designs often include all the instructions of a predecessor and may add additional instructions. Occasionally a successor design will discontinue or alter the meaning of some instruction code (typically because it is needed for new purposes), affecting code compatibility to some extent; even nearly completely compatible processors may show slightly different behavior for some instructions, but this is seldom a problem. Systems may also differ in other details, such as memory arrangement, operating systems, or peripheral devices. Because a program normally relies on such factors, different systems will typically not run the same machine code, even when the same type of processor is used.

A machine code instruction set may have all instructions of the same length, or it may have variable-length instructions. How the patterns are organized varies strongly with the particular architecture and often also with the type of instruction. Most instructions have one or more opcode fields which specifies the basic instruction type (such as arithmetic, logical, jump, etc.) and the actual operation (such as add or compare) and other fields that may give the type of the operand(s), the addressing mode(s), the addressing offset(s) or index, or the actual value itself (such constant operands contained in an instruction are called immediates).^[3]

Machine instructions are normally documented as having some explicit number of operands, such as a source and destination operand as for the 386 ADD instruction, but some instructions, such as the 386 CPUID instruction do not have any explicit operands. Instead such instructions have implicit operands. The CPUID instruction implicitly assigns values to EAX, EBX, ECX and EDX, which means that technically it has four destination operands, although these are implicit. The distinction is important when designing machine code generator software for the purposes of register allocation and live range tracking. An intelligent code optimizer will be able to track implicit operands as well as explicit operands, which allows in some cases for constant folding of registers if a register should be assigned a constant and it's implicit usage shows that it can be replaced by the constant(Or immediate value in machine code parlance).

Programs

A computer program is a sequence of instructions that are executed by a CPU. While simple processors execute instructions one after the other, superscalar processors are capable of executing several instructions at once.

Program flow may be influenced by special 'jump' instructions that transfer execution to an instruction other than the numerically following one. Conditional jumps are taken (execution continues at another address) or not (execution continues at the next instruction) depending on some condition.

Assembly languages

A much more readable rendition of machine language, called assembly language, uses mnemonic codes to refer to machine code instructions, rather than using the instructions' numeric values directly. For example, on the Zilog Z80 processor, the machine code 00000101, which causes the CPU to decrement the B processor register, would be represented in assembly language as DEC B.

Example

The MIPS architecture provides a specific example for a machine code whose instructions are always 32 bits long. The general type of instruction is given by the op (operation) field, the highest 6 bits. J-type (jump) and I-type (immediate) instructions are fully specified by op. R-type (register) instructions include an additional field funct to determine the exact operation. The fields used in these types are:

   6  5 5 5 5  6 bits[  op  |  rs |  rt |  rd |shamt| funct]  R-type[  op  |  rs |  rt | address/immediate]  I-type[  op  | target address ]  J-type

rs, rt, and rd indicate register operands; shamt gives a shift amount; and the address or immediate fields contain an operand directly.

For example adding the registers 1 and 2 and placing the result in register 6 is encoded:

[  op  |  rs |  rt |  rd |shamt| funct] 0 1 2 6 0 32 decimal 000000 00001 00010 00110 00000 100000   binary

Load a value into register 8, taken from the memory cell 68 cells after the location listed in register 3:

[  op  |  rs |  rt | address/immediate]   35 3 8   68   decimal 100011 00011 01000 00000 00001 000100   binary

Jumping to the address 1024:

[  op  | target address ] 2 1024   decimal 000010 00000 00000 00000 10000 000000   binary

Relationship to microcode

In some computer architectures, the machine code is implemented by a more fundamental underlying layer of programs called microprograms, providing a common machine language interface across a line or family of different models of computer with widely different underlying dataflows. This is done to facilitate porting of machine language programs between different models. An example of this use is the IBM System/360 family of computers and their successors. With dataflow path widths of 8 bits to 64 bits and beyond, they nevertheless present a common architecture at the machine language level across the entire line.

Using a microcode layer to implement an emulator enables the computer to present the architecture of an entirely different computer. The System/360 line used this to allow porting programs from earlier IBM machines to the new family of computers, e.g. an IBM 1401/1440/1460 emulator on the IBM S/360 model 40.

Storing in memory

The Harvard architecture is a computer architecture with physically separate storage and signal pathways for the code (instructions) and data. Today, most processors implement such separate signal pathways for performance reasons but actually implement a Modified Harvard architecture, so they can support tasks like loading an executable program from disk storage as data and then executing it. Harvard architecture is contrasted to the Von Neumann architecture, where data and code are stored in the same memory.

From the point of view of a process, the code space is the part of its address space where code in execution is stored. In multitasking systems this comprises the program's code segment and usually shared libraries. In multi-threading environment, different threads of one process share code space along with data space, which reduces the overhead of context switching considerably as compared to process switching.

Readability by humans

It has been said that machine code is so unreadable that the United States Copyright Office cannot even identify whether a particular encoded program is an original work of authorship.^[4] Hofstadter compares machine code with the genetic code: "Looking at a program written in machine language is vaguely comparable to looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom."^[5]

See also

• Assembly language
• Endianness
• List of machine languages
• Machine code monitor
• Overhead code
• P-code machine
• Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)
• VLIW
• Teaching Machine Code: Microprofessor I

Further reading

• Hennessy, John L.; Patterson, David A.. Computer Organization and Design. The Hardware/Software Interface.. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN 1-55860-281-X.
• Tanenbaum, Andrew S.. Structured Computer Organization. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-020435-8.
• Brookshear, J. Glenn. Computer Science: An Overview. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-321-38701-5.

Notes and references