Assembly & Related Notes

These notes are focused on assembly language and related tooling (linkers, loaders, etc).

Speficially, those used on the following machines:

• Modern personal computers (MS Windows, Linux, or Mac)
• Video Game Consoles (fourth gen and up)

Significant Authorship

These are in alphabetical order by author.

Brian Robert Callahan

Demystifying programs that create programs

• Part 1: A disassembler
• Part 2: Starting an assembler
• Part 3: Globals, passes, and error handling
• Part 4: Parsing
• Part 5: Processing our first opcode
• Part 6: Processing more opcodes
• Part 7: Further opcode processing
• Part 8: Finishing opcode processing
• Source

Casey Muratori

Performance-Aware Programming Series

• Part 1: Reading ASM
  • Instruction Decoding on the 8086
  • Decoding Multiple Instructions and Suffixes
  • Opcode Patterns in 8086 Arithmetic
  • 8086 Decoder Code Review
  • Using the Reference Decoder as a Shared Library
  • Simulating Non-memory MOVs
  • Simulating ADD, SUB, and CMP
  • Simulating Conditional Jumps
  • Simulating Memory
  • Simulating Real Programs
  • Other Common Instructions
  • The Stack
  • From 8086 to x64
  • 8086 Simulation Code Review

David Salomon

https://www.davidsalomon.name

Assemblers and Loaders (1993)

Ian Lance Taylor

20 part Linker Essay (on LWN)

John R. Levine

https://www.johnlevine.com/index.phtml

Linkers and Loaders (2000)

Michael Abrash

Zen of Assembly Language

Tools

Order by interest. My preference was on simple tools written in a C-like, data-oriented, or procedural way. I don't want to deal with low level tooling marred by dense language abstractions.

Zydis

• ZASM (Zydis frontend, not to be confused with Z80 assembler...)

YASM (Rewrite of (some) of Netwide in C)

• Design
• User Manual
• libyasm

DynASM

AsmJit

• AsmTK

FASM

VASM

HLA

TASM

Everything below is just noted to exist but I don't care for.

Netwide Assembler

MASM

GAS

Exectuable Formats

• PE Format
• ELF
• Mach-O

Misc

SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard