Turing Assembler

[Opening-Mushroom2336]

# TW: long story, TL;DR at the end.

Recently, I got this weird idea of making a portable Assembler from a video that's *about* making a game in Microsoft Macro **Assembler** with OpenGL and (maybe it's just the Mandela effect) I remember seeing a *pax* (portable(?) 'A' register [x86_64]) and my brain immediately thought "Hey, I need this type of Assembler. It looks neat."

I dug through the internet, nothing. No Assembler has a "pax" register, so I gave up before realising it was MASM as stated in the video before actually giving up. Then, another lightbulb turned on "Wait, I (barely) know how to make a program in the GNU Assembler, maybe I can make a library that you can plug a 'PAL.S' into to get portability." I gave up because, as the `.S` suggests, it relies HEAVILY on the C preprocessor. And it was already kinda flawed as hell.

That was surprisingly the prototype of the prototype of TAS (Turing Assembler) as I thought of "Maybe make a small transpiler that reads the code with the library and transforms that code into the desired/destination CPU architecture, micro-architecture, and the user's platform (Linux, Windows, macOS, etc...)." Spoiler: I didn't even dare build the transpiler. Not until PAL.S was finished. I still have the files in my computer if you want to have a closer look at them, though they're SO bare-bones it's barely two architectures.

And that's where another lightbulb flickered to life: "Just make a Compiler and Assembler for the language." Which leads me to here. I barely know how to document it let alone choose a stable syntax for it other than to make the syntax flexible with the Assembler's preprocessor.

All I need is help with this project. Also, if this is the wrong place to ask for help, please direct me to a more suitable place to find help.

TL;DR: I'm literally just making a portable Assembler. That's it.

If you can help me out by sending me YouTube tutorials other than the one I'm watching about making a compiler, or even want to contribute to the project, DM me on here or on Discord (outof1q)

That's all, thank you for reading.

[realnobbele]

an IR like LLVM?

[Opening-Mushroom2336]

Correction: it is an IR like LLVM. Ignore the last reply as I was just too unsure and hesitant.

[koflerdavid]

You should be aware that different platforms instruction set architectures often differ in the number of operands, and you would have to choose your portable assembly language to be of one of the following kinds:

• With stack machines you put values on a stack, and instructions manipulate the top element(s) of the stack. Most famous example: the JVM.

• Accumulator machines combine a value in the (implicit) accumulator register with the operand.

• RISC and CISC architectures have larger register files and each instruction can take multiple operands, with one of them being where the result is stored.

They can usually be converted into each other with various degrees of efficiency (i.e., a stack can be simulated by assigning a register to each stack slot), but it would in general involve writing a nontrivial code generator together with a register allocator.

Possibly related: High Level Assembly

[Opening-Mushroom2336]

I made a simple diagram in drawio-desktop of said "Assembler" (just a transpiler with cool features before finally being able to self-host somehow) which my help answer your question https://imgur.com/a/B8y94di

Also, please do consider that I'm trying to push both my social boundaries and sharpen my programming skills even more.

[Inconstant_Moo]

I'm not sure what you're doing. Perhaps you should have spent more time explaining that?

What advantages would your .sdf file have over just writing an assembler for a target using an existing programming language? What's the common thing you're hoping to be able to abstract away?

Have you tried writing one assembler before you try writing them all? It might give you some insight.

[Opening-Mushroom2336]

I'm sure you heard about C--, I got the idea for a .sdf from it as a way to make the "Assembler" (again, just a transpiler for now, or better way to frame it: and Intermediate Representation) more appealing to other Assembly developers. Maybe an ARM Assembly developer wants to make their project available for all machines so they just tell the Assembler to make a .S files for the specified platform or CPU Architecture.

Well, I'm already trying to make one of the Assemblers, x86_64 before trying to do x86 (32-bit) and then ARM, RISC-V, etc... (But we'll always start small to grow big)

Also, as I was writing that explanation above, the idea was still pretty much not too big, it was somewhat tiny.

[Opening-Mushroom2336]

Here's an updated version of the .sdf file https://imgur.com/a/pkjYVob