What not as assembler and it's debugger?

What not as assembler and it's debugger?

[Mayuresh Kathe]

Since the elfutils project provides a Linux-only tuned edition of ELF 
binary management toolkit, why does it not also include an assembler and 
it's associated debugger?

I understand that the AT&T mnemonics are something of a standard under 
Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and that GNU binutils provides 
"as" for the same, but since elfutils provides replacements for almost 
all of the utilities from binutils why not an assembler too?

Also, if interested in a "assembly language debugger", I would suggest 
ALD; http://ald.sourceforge.net/
ALD is now frozen and almost abandon-ware, but if it could be pulled-in 
and revived as part of elfutils, that would be really big deal for those 
of us who only work with the low-level ELF oriented code using 
assembler.

Thanks,

~Mayuresh

Re: What not as assembler and it's debugger?

[Mark Wielaard]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 09:14:01AM +0530, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
> Since the elfutils project provides a Linux-only tuned edition of ELF binary
> management toolkit, why does it not also include an assembler and it's
> associated debugger?
> 
> I understand that the AT&T mnemonics are something of a standard under Unix
> and Unix-like operating systems, and that GNU binutils provides "as" for the
> same, but since elfutils provides replacements for almost all of the
> utilities from binutils why not an assembler too?

The simple answer is, not enough time.
There is a start of an assembler/disassembler in elfutils/libasm.
But the number of architectures it supports is currently very limited.

Likewise for a full debugger. There is some support for debugger like
functionality in the DWARF Frontend Library (libdwfl). But extending
that to a traditional debugger is a lot of work. Although people have
done something like that, see https://sourceware.org/systemtap and
https://drgn.readthedocs.io.

Cheers,

Mark