What's the relationship between binutils and gcc?

Question

As titled, is binutils contained in gcc for Centos Linux? If I install gcc rpm package, is there need to install binutils also? What's more, are gcc and g++ both installed by default in Centos?

Answer 1

The gcc package probably contains the compiler proper, eg files /usr/bin/gcc and directory /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.8/ (which contains the cc1 executable).

The /usr/bin/gcc program starts cc1 (or cc1plus etc...) to compile your source code *.c , and also as to translate cc1 -generated assembly code (produced by cc1 ) into object file *.o , and at last ld to link.

Compile once with gcc -v to understand what is happening, it would show the really executed binaries. Notice that gcc is only a driving program (starting other executables like cc1 , as , ld ...)

The as and ld programs are provided by binutils -which is needed to compile.

So the binutils package is a required dependency for the gcc package (with many other dependencies, probably including libc and libc-devel , but if you really want you could use some other libc like MUSL libc ; the libc is generally providing the dynamic linker like /lib/ld-linux.so* ).

Learn how to use rpm (on Centos, or dpkg on Ubuntu & Debian) to query the dependencies between packages .

For development you probably want some other packages. Debian has the build-essential virtual package. Probably CentOS has an equivalent. And you'll surely want to use some libraries (and you want the development packages for them, eg on Debian libcurl4-gnutls-dev to develop with the libcurl HTTP client library). See also this answer (for Ubuntu and Debian, but you can adapt it for CentOS).