Nasm

[audinue]

Anyone using NASM?
How is it? How about GAS, MASM, TASM?

[EVOEx]

I kind of like nasm. But I did have some problems writing windows applications with it. With masm this is really easy, but I hate the forced stupid bloated microsoft syntax that comes with it. The others I don't know.

My advise is to try nasm first. Nice, plain syntax that assembly should be. Unless of course you like the ms syntax...

[audinue]

Originally Posted by EVOEx

I kind of like nasm. But I did have some problems writing windows applications with it. With masm this is really easy, but I hate the forced stupid bloated microsoft syntax that comes with it. The others I don't know.

My advise is to try nasm first. Nice, plain syntax that assembly should be. Unless of course you like the ms syntax...

Any tutorial/something that may help a newbie?

I've downloaded nasm-2.06rc1 from sf.net and trying to compile this one but it says:
test.asm:4: error: parser: instruction expected

section .text 
extern  _MessageBoxA@16 
%if     __NASM_VERSION_ID__ >= 0x02030000 
safeseh handler         ; register handler as "safe handler" 
%endif 
handler: 
        push    DWORD 1 ; MB_OKCANCEL 
        push    DWORD caption 
        push    DWORD text 
        push    DWORD 0 
        call    _MessageBoxA@16 
        sub     eax,1   ; incidentally suits as return value 
                        ; for exception handler 
        ret 
global  _main 
_main: 
        push    DWORD handler 
        push    DWORD [fs:0] 
        mov     DWORD [fs:0],esp ; engage exception handler 
        xor     eax,eax 
        mov     eax,DWORD[eax]   ; cause exception 
        pop     DWORD [fs:0]     ; disengage exception handler 
        add     esp,4 
        ret 
text:   db      'OK to rethrow, CANCEL to generate core dump',0 
caption:db      'SEGV',0 
 
section .drectve info 
        db      '/defaultlib:user32.lib /defaultlib:msvcrt.lib '

Got it from manual page.

[brewbuck]

Originally Posted by audinue

Anyone using NASM?
How is it? How about GAS, MASM, TASM?

I'd stay away from gas unless you actually need it. It was meant more as a back-end assembler for the GNU compiler suite, not an every day assembler, so it lacks some of the conveniences of other assemblers. But sometimes you can only accomplish certain things with gas.

When you don't need the special features of gas, I'd use NASM.

Both gas and NASM can produce native object code, so there's no problem using both of them in the same project if you want.