Does Visual Studio generate assembly from the C source or from the binary code it compiled into?

When I run my code (any code), in debug mode I have the option of "Disassembly".

I know that "Disassembly" is the creation of assembly code from machine code (‘1’ and ‘0’ that stored in object files).

So, I can assume that when I compile my code in Visual Studio, there is no "Assembly/Assembler" stage between the C/C++ code to the machine code/object file, and if I want to see the Assembly code I need to ask Visual Studio to disassemble it from object file to assembly.

So my questions are:

1. am I right, is there no way to see asm other than disassembly?

2. (if 1 is no): why does Visual Studio’s debugger show a "Disassembly" option, not "Assembly"?

3. Does Clang/GCC have an assembly stage, or does the C/C++ code compile to object code directly?

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editor’s note: the answer to 3 actually differs for GCC vs. most other mainstream C/C++ compilers like clang/LLVM and MSVC. Since that’s kind of a separate question from how MSVC works, that part is a duplicate of these other SO Q&As:

• Does a compiler always produce an assembly code?
• What do C and Assembler actually compile to?
• What is the need to generate ASM code in gcc, g++