Re: NASM dead?
- From: spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 26 Jun 2006 06:16:35 -0700
Hey Randy,
randyhyde@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Andreas Kochenburger wrote:
What is the current maintenance/development status of NASM?
Anyone who wants to work on it, can!
Or have all volunteers wandered away to more "sexy" assemblers?
The original developers gave up on it (apparently).
You mean Simon and Jules? I don't know exactly when their involvement
ended, but it seems like sometime around 0.98.08 or so (according to
the NASMDOC.TXT).
I don't know the exact status of the NASM development team, but NASM
has been languishing in need of a rewrite for many years now (to get to
the fabled "v1.0" state)
Their todo list isn't that big, but I dunno how complex it would be to
implement. Most programs never reach the 1.0 "finished" stage anyways
(open source or otherwise). Not saying that's ideal, but realistically,
people lose interest when it gets to be too much work.
and the few people who've put in the effort to
do a rewrite have branched off with their own assembler (e.g., YASM).
YASM has progressed quite well. I'm glad. :-)
OTOH, thinking NASM is dead is a bit premature. It's still the
second-most popular assembler in use today (after MASM)
There are much older/deader assemblers than NASM. For instance, 0.98.39
just came out in early '05, so how "dead" can it be? The CVS was
updated three months ago (at least). Yes, it's very popular. CC386 uses
a modified version of it as a backend.
I know some people (still?) use MASM, and there's a few forums for it,
but I somewhat doubt it's the most popular assembler. It seems to only
enjoy most of its use in the Windows sector.
, so even if there isn't active development on the product, it's far from dead.
Many people believe that FASM will become the heir to NASM;
Different designs and goals: NASM supports aout, obj, rdoff, etc. and
lots of commandline parameters while FASM avoids the cmdline options
almost completely, supports 64-bit instructions, and can produce .EXEs
directly without a linker. The macro syntaxes for each are wildly
different (though FASM can emulate a bit of NASM's).
I know you know all this, though (from developing HLA). :-)
but until FASM gets ported to as many OSes as NASM, I think that will be unlikely.
FASM runs on at least seven different OSes (Linux, Win32, DOS,
Unix/libc, MenuetOS, Dex4U, OctaOS), but it'll probably never be quite
as portable as NASM since the latter was written in ANSI C. Still, how
portable does an x86 assembler need to be??
Yes, it is a bummer that development on NASM isn't as active as many
users would like. The macros could use a bit of improvement and there
are a probably a few bugs here and there that could be squashed. But by
and large NASM has been remarkably stable for the past couple of years,
and that counts for something.
I can't blame 'em, really, it's complicated. But, it is a bit silly
that the website is broken. :-/
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Long live NASM! :-)
.
- References:
- NASM dead?
- From: Andreas Kochenburger
- Re: NASM dead?
- From: randyhyde@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- NASM dead?
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