Building

One line: Three programs stand between a .c file and something you can run — the compiler, the linker and make — and only the first two ever read your code; make decides which of them to run from file names and timestamps alone.

Lesson	Level	What it teaches
Makefiles: a build graph you write by hand	101 → 201	A rule, a TAB and a timestamp comparison are the whole of make — so a header nobody listed leaves a stale program and no error, until the compiler writes the dependency list for you
Reading a real Makefile	201 → 301	A 31-line Makefile from a C++Now 2026 keynote that writes its own rules — define, $(call), $(eval), and the $$ that survives both — read line by line, then built on Linux and refused by a Mac

Planned

Rough order, not a promise:

• What cc actually runs — the preprocessor, the compiler proper, the assembler and the linker as separate steps, and cc -v to watch it call them
• The linker — until then, the Rust library's The linker ↗ covers the stage no compiler owns
• Static and shared libraries — ar and .a, .so and .dylib, and why a Mac will not link -static at all
• CMake — a program that writes Makefiles, and why its errors arrive at two different times