As the software development landscape evolves, new security vulnerabilities are surfacing. Traditionally, a software’s source code could shed light on its vulnerabilities, but acquiring high-quality source code for the purpose of finding weaknesses can be difficult because of “compiling.”
Compiling refers to the process of transforming and optimizing a program’s source code to generate a final executable, which is a file that causes a computer to perform indicated tasks according to the encoded instructions. While an executable performs well and runs quickly on computers, it no longer has any information about the original source code.
Today, more and more software is developed in high-level programming languages, such as C++, Go and Rust, because of their many advantages, including higher development speed and better software engineering practices. Most importantly, programs written in high-level languages are compiled into machine code, the elemental language of computers, and will execute on computers at what is known as native speed. Executing at native speed allows for the fastest results.