Does any one know of such a compiler/assembler?

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Does any know of a compiler/assembler that :
Is easily portable to a hobby OS
Is Open Source
Can fit in a 32K memory segment
Is 16 BIT
Supports FAT 16/FAT 12

Posted 17-Aug-13 15:23pm

sid2x

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Ron Beyer 17-Aug-13 21:42pm

Do you want to compile the hobby OS, or compile on the hobby OS? What OS is it? You may be able to cross-compile gcc, depends more on the processor architecture (x86, arm, powerpc, etc).

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 17-Aug-13 21:48pm

In principle it should be possible, but I don't feel it's a serious question. I would prefer to learn what OS is it all about, if any...
Compare with the question by the same member: http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/638757/C-Cplusplus-and-Java-Compilers-code-source.
—SA

Ron Beyer 17-Aug-13 21:56pm

Probably a serious question but a naive understanding. I replied to the question linked too.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 17-Aug-13 22:15pm

Well, you are using a bit different notion of "serious question". It is only related to serious field, but it does not make the question itself serious. If you look at other OP's question you may understand what I mean.

For example, we already have some questions in this forum which are logically similar to the question "How can I create a theory of quantum gravity?" (No, it has nothing to do with the present question.) Would such question be serious? And the whole topic?

In this very case, I would wrap up the discussion until OP gives us something which could be considered as "serious feedback"... :-)

—SA

Ron Beyer 17-Aug-13 22:35pm

I've asked many a serious question (to me) that ended up being a joke because I didn't understand (naive) the whole picture. Replace a connecting rod in my engine? How hard could it be? Kinda feel bad the car is in the junkyard now :) (to be fair, I was 17 at the time)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Aug-13 11:27am

Look at the last long comment by pasztorpisti, about the ease of writing compilers and "FAT support", spectacular putting all dots under 'i'...
—SA

pasztorpisti 18-Aug-13 10:05am

I understand what you mean. Especially when it comes to the assembler that supports FAT. :-) :-) :-)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Aug-13 11:25am

:-)

sid2x 17-Aug-13 22:34pm

I want to compile on the hobby os, it has FAT16 support,ELF Loaders, and supported for Intel x86, Uses GRUB, has 32K memory segment for ring 3 applications, most of it is written is in C and Assembly, has a keyboard driver, is that enough?Sorry if I didn't specify all this. It has 5 system calls that can be used by applications.

Ron Beyer 17-Aug-13 22:40pm

Is this something you wrote or something you found online? Link if available?

sid2x 17-Aug-13 22:48pm

It's both for ex : got the ELF loader from MikeOS, kernel myself but I borrowed the keyboard driver from GazOS, FAT16 I asked my friend for that, Although you CAN use C to write programs but it's possible only on the development computer.The compiler I use to compile is GCC. Also my programs are loaded at 32768 in the memory. Is that enough? Or more info is required?

sid2x 17-Aug-13 23:00pm

I guess I should first write an interpreter for my OS, then think about a compiler..... Cause I don't think there exists such a compiler or does it?

Ron Beyer 17-Aug-13 23:13pm

MikeOS seems to have a BASIC interpreter, you might start there. I'm not sure you are going to find a modern compiler that fits in a 32k memory segment. You might want to search for very old versions of gcc (ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/old-releases/gcc-1/) but they seem to be much bigger than can fit. You may be stuck using BASIC on the OS until you can address higher than 64k.

pasztorpisti 18-Aug-13 10:04am

Writing an assembler is extremely easy. The first assembler I've used was my own creature and I wrote it in basic. If you write an assembler in assembly then the source code and the resulting binary will be extremely small if you support just the basic instructions without mmx, sse, 3dnow, ...
5 system calls? That can change the world. All you need in an assembler is some file operations to read in the source code and then to write out the generated code. All the rest is a bunch of simple memory operations and arithmetic. For this reason porting an assembler is extremely easiy, you have to port only the file operations. If the source of the compiler is in C and it uses the std api (FILE*, fopen) then basically you have nothing to port, you just have to compile it with the compiler of your OS if you have a C compiler.
Do you know what makes your question quite non-serious and ridiculous? The support of FAT. Anyone having a little experience in OS-es and maybe compilers knows that compilers/assemblers have nothing to do with FAT. When you read in the source code and when you write out the generated binary then the OS will do the FAT related stuff when you ask for the file operations from your compiler.

Writing an assembler is terribly simple, it has almost nothing to do with writing a high level language compiler, maybe you can put in some expression parsing if you want but that is optional. You can write your own if you want by reading through an intel assembly documentation. If you are lazy then here is a list of assemblers, browse in the x86 assembler's table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_assemblers
I recommend fasm from the table, that is an assember with long history, originally it was a 16-bit only assember so searching for the source of an older version would be better for you then downloading a new version that requires you to remove a lot of non-16 bit specific instruction compilation code that you don't need.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 18-Aug-13 11:24am

Exactly!
—SA

pasztorpisti 18-Aug-13 11:33am

Thank you! :-)

sid2x 21-Aug-13 6:22am

Thanks Guys! And I am really surprised what pasztorpisti said "Assembler in BASIC", In fact we considered BASIC to be nothing in those days. We school guys thought it was just a useless programming language. But now I am going to look back at BASIC.

pasztorpisti 21-Aug-13 8:54am

You can write an assembler in anything. An assembler just reads in a line and interprets it. The line is either a special directive like ".386" or a label like "mylabel:" or an instruction with operands like "mov ax, 5" or "goto mylabel". All of these is easy to interpret in any language. I hate basic but that time I had only that high level language available and it was still faster to put together my assembler than doing the same in assembly especially because of the bugfixing! In basic (and generally in any high level language) its much easier to catch bugs than in assembly!
If you roll your own assembler then you can break the rules to make your assembler simpler and smaller than some standard wide spread assemblers (like masm or tasm). You don't have to support all of the keywords and syntax provided by these "modern" assemblers. For example you don't have to support function declarations with keywords like "proc" and "end" and segments ("seg" end "ends"). In a simply 16 bit assembler all you need is labels and jmp and call instructions that can jump and call to these labels. In a simple assember I wouldn't allow putting label on the same line with an instruction, allowing only either label or something else on a line is quite ok in assembly. You can leave out a lot of "garbage" you don't need from a recent assembler. Rolling your own stuff is also fun and you can learn a lot from it. Still I would cheat a bit by taking a look at the source of fasm to find out what it does when it compiles the 16 bit instructions.

sid2x 21-Aug-13 10:28am

So do you have any resources that help you with this? Help would be greatly appreciated....

pasztorpisti 21-Aug-13 12:13pm

What can be better resource than the source code of one of the assemblers I've linked?

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