Thanks for the advice Nick

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 8:51 AM Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>