Comment by gingerBill
2 days ago
> It supports x86, too
Well I assumed so because amd64 is a superset of x86. But nice to know you're working on arm64 too.
Regarding Intel-syntax, I think there is a little miscommunication here since I try to explain what I mean in the article. Intel-ordering is a good idea, but using nothing but the Intel-syntax wholesale is not universal enough, and needs modifying, especially for AMD64 and other ISAs. Odin's is Intel-like too, but fully Intel by design.
> That's so the source code can be tokenized and parsed without needing special behavior inside the asm { ... }.
This is why Odin's asm templates have their own universalized syntax. Thus the entire article.
> Not sure what you mean. RAX means register RAX. %RAX is not accepted.
This: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/druntime/src/core/i...
It's why I referred to your "trick", which is something I wanted to need in the first place.
> That just makes it easier to parse!
For Odin's asm template syntax, it's not about being easier to parser, it's about having a context free grammar that is the same across ISAs. If I was to allow for prefixes directly in the grammar, either prefixes would have to have their special syntax or you'd need to have a context-sensitive grammar.
Oh I see what you mean. The "trick" has nothing to do with the inline assembler - it's a way the user can manipulate strings and then feed the result to the parser. String mixins are a very popular feature of D.
A little secret - the D parser does not actually parse the asm syntax. It just snarfs up tokens until it sees the `;`. The semantic phase of the compiler then applies a grammar over it, which is not the D grammar, but the Intel grammar. This enables it to apply custom grammars to each supported instruction set.
That "trick" is just a fancy string effectively, the thing I am complaining about in the first part of the article. And that little secret really does mean it is a fancy string again.
I did not want any of that for any reason.