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)

David Salomon

https://www.davidsalomon.name

Assemblers and Loaders (1993)

John R. Levine

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

Linkers and Loaders (2000)

Ian Lance Taylor

20 part Linker Essay (on LWN)

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)

AsmJit

FASM

VASM

HLA

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

Netwide Assembler

MASM

GAS

Exectuable Formats

• PE Format
• ELF
• Mach-O