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Re: other apps that assemble code



On Thu, 5 Feb 1998, Doug Evans wrote:

>    Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 11:47:36 -0600 (CST)
>    From: Joel Sherrill <joel@OARcorp.com>
> 
>    I have seen articles about "optimizing assemblers" for really smart cpus
>    which insert nops, reorder instructions to avoid stalls, reassign
>    registers, etc.   This type of tools would benefit from a generic assembly
>    language parser.
> 
> Ok, but methinks this is still just GAS.
> Or am I misunderstanding something?

I guess it could be but would it be cleaner to have it as a separate tool
which manipulated source.  Technically either approach is viable.

>From an implementation standpoint, having a separate tool might make that
tool easier to update/port.  From a strict viewpoint, gas shoud only take
assembler and generate object.  That is a difficult enough process as it
is.  Having to deal with possible code reordering, nops could only make
gas more complex and difficult to maintain.

I don't know much about gas internals.  Does it have an internal
representation which could be manipulated like this?

-joel