[LLVMdev] llc generated machine assembly code for NASM

[Chris Lattner]

On Jan 28, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Dustin Laurence wrote:

> On 01/28/2010 11:41 AM, Anton Korobeynikov wrote:
>>
>> The required efforts equal to ones required to write new assembler.
>> "Too weak to be usable" means "it's not possible to represent many
>> important constructs with masm/nasm/fasm".
>
> Wow.  It's perhaps too much of a distraction, but I'm curious about  
> the
> details of this.  It's probably because it's first mission is to be a
> compiler back-end, but the common wisdom is that gas is bare-bones and
> masm is featureful.  Clearly that doesn't hold for what LLVM needs,  
> and
> you imply it's true for the whole family of assemblers that use Intel
> syntax.  Very surprising to those of us (well, me anyway) with minimal
> time writing actual assembly.

The long term plans are to finish the integrated assembler.  We  
currently have active work to finish the assembler for Macho X86 32/64  
targets.  I suspect that ELF will follow shortly after that, though I  
don't know who exactly will do the work.  Adding PECOFF support should  
not be that hard, and would obviate the dependence on a third-party  
assembler.

MASM is not a production quality assembler IMO, which is why Microsoft  
doesn't use it with VC++.  I don't know whether nasm or fasm are, but  
I think it's more productive to work on the integrated assembler  
(again, once the macho support is complete and reliable) than to add  
nasm/fasm support.

-Chris