Appendix D: Glossary

A

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a program component that contains functionality that programmers can use in their own program.

Assembly

CodeAssembly code is a low-level programming language that performs the most basic operations. When assembly code is assembled, the result is machine code that is directly executed by a processor. Writing inline assembly routines in C/C++ code often produces a more efficient and faster application; however, the code is harder to maintain, less readable, and some- times substantially longer.

B

Big

Endian On a big-endian system, the most significant byte is stored first. Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC) is an example of a big-endian architecture.

Buffer

Abuffer is an area of memory allocated with a fixed size. It is commonly used as a temporary holding zone when data is transferred between two devices that are not operating at the same speed or workload. Dynamic buffers are allocated on the heap using malloc. When defining static variables, the buffer is allocated on the stack.

Buffer Overflow

Ageneric buffer overflow occurs when a buffer has been allo- cated and more data than expected was copied into it. The two classes of overflows include heapand stackoverflows.

Bytecode

Bytecode is program code that is in between the high-level language code understood by humans and the machine code read by computers. Bytecode is useful as an intermediate step for languages such as Java, which are platform-independent. Bytecode interpreters for each system interpret byte- code faster than is possible...