Do programming language compilers first translate to assembly or directly to machine code?

Question

I\'m primarily interested in popular and widely used compilers, such as gcc. But if things are done differently with different compilers, I\'d like to know that, too.

Answer 1

According to chapter 2 of Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software (by Mike Perry and Nasko Oskov), both gcc and cl.exe (the back end compiler for MSVC++) have the -S switch you can use to output the assembly that each compiler produces.

You can also run gcc in verbose mode (gcc -v) to get a list of commands that it executes to see what it's doing behind the scenes.