Hello Tom,

great to hear about your interest. Unfortunately I do not have any 
experience in generating  IA-32 assembler (or any other assembler). I 
have only programmed front-end and optimisation passes of real compilers.

None of my compiler books says much concrete about assembler code. Note 
also that we target a stack machine, real processors have a slightly 
different instruction set, using the stack only for function calls and 
argument passing, but the registers for storing intermediate results. 
"modern compiler implementation in Java" by Andrew Appel says more about 
producing code for a standard processor. However, the book hardly 
mentions assembler. There is supposed to be lots of code and 
documentation on the web, but the link on the Cambridge University Press 
site doesn't work. (Maybe ask the author?)

Our library doesn't seem to have any recent books on assembler 
programming. Bob Eager might be a good person to ask for information.

I suppose you already found the following websites:
http://asm.sourceforge.net/
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/assembly-language/x86/general/part3/section-1.html

An alternative to producing IA-32 assembler would be to produce Java 
byte code, using Jasmin. http://jasmin.sourceforge.net/

Yet another idea would be to target transputer bytecode. A group of 
people in the department developed the transterpreter, and hence they 
have some expertise in producing transputer bytecode. 
http://www.transterpreter.org

If you are interested in this topic, maybe you want to do your final 
year project in this area? I'm interested in getting a small functional 
language with Erlang-like communicating processes running on the Lego 
Mindstorms. Originally I thought of compiling to the transterpreter, but 
now I tend more towards an interpreter in C for a Scheme-like language. 
That would be more flexible but also require writing the schedular for 
the concurrent processes. I'm open to other suggestions.

Please tell me how you are getting on with your code generation and 
whether I can help you with some issue.

Ciao,
Olaf


tpc4@kent.ac.uk wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I finished off the assessment 4 for the CO524 module a couple of days ago
>and have since then been trying to work out how assembly actually works,
>with the ultimate goal of producing an executable that I can actually run.
>Do you have experiance of this "final step" of compiler writing? I found a
>couple of books in the library about compilers that do have a lot of
>practical stuff about writing the parser, lexical analyser and such but
>nothing about making an actual executable.
>
>Could you point me in the right direction? I've so far had a quick look at
>nasm and the GNU "as" assemblers, but for both of those there seems to be
>a wealth of "Hello World" programs online but nothing much more useful!
>
>Yours, inquisitively...
>
>Tom Carlson
>
>  
>