How Do You Make An Assembler?

x86 assembly
mudge picture mudge · Mar 19, 2010 · Viewed 38.2k times · Source

I'd like to make a simple x86 assembler. I'm wondering if there's any tutorials for making your own assembler. Or if there's a simple assembler that I could study.

Also, I wonder what tools are used in looking at and handling the binary/hex of programs.

Answer

claws picture claws · Mar 19, 2010

This is what you are looking for:

Assemblers And Loaders - By David Salomon. Published February, 1993 - Freely available (download here)

Of course, you are going to need the following:

  1. Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manuals
  2. AMD-64 Architecture Programmers manual
  3. Linkers and Loaders by John R. Levine (freely available)
  4. ELF File Format Specifications : System V ABI Update
  5. Microsoft Portable Executable and Common Object File Format Specification

You can always refer to implementations of Opensource Assemblers:

  1. Netwide Assembler (NASM)
  2. Gnu Assembler (GAS)

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