Re: Gas developing

[Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>]

Hi Azael,

> now I want to create a useful assembler with new capabilities, even I want to add a high level assembler like a C/C++ syntaxes, all that to support the open source movement.

Well I wish you luck.  I feel that I should point out that there
are already two open source assemblers available - the one from
the GNU binutils project and the one from the LLVM project.  So
you probably need to have some feature to make yours stand out.

Also please be prepared for the fact that creating a fully functional
assembler is no small task.  You will find that it will take up a
lot of your time.

As a suggestion I would restrict yourself to just supporting the
ELF file format and the DWARF debug format.  There are other
formats out there, but only supporting one does make things simpler.
Plus you may be able to take advantage of packages like the elfutils
which provide libraries for manipulating ELF and DWARF.

Another suggestion is to steal, sorry I mean borrow, all of the
tests used by the other assemblers.  Make sure that your assembler
can pass those tests too.  That should give you great confidence
that the assembler works.

Oh and one more thing - document everything.  Good documentation
and good comments are the key to a long lived open source project.

Cheers
   Nick