When you buy software, the source code usually is not made public, but doesn’t your computer still have to run the code to use the software? How can it run the code without allowing the user to see the code?

Question

When you buy software, the source code usually is not made public, but doesn’t your computer still have to run the code to use the software? How can it run the code without allowing the user to see the code?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Computer languages (C++, C#, python, etc) exist only to offer up an interface for humans to communicate instructions in a readable manner to a device.

Once a program is written and compiled they are turned into machine code and specifically Binary. You can view these instructions but it’s not easily readable and to actually convert it back to something that is readable you need to reverse engineer the code, that can be difficult to do and take a while to do.

So the code itself is not executed its the instructions created from the code.