Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
keleshev.com
Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#2I got the ebook when it came out, and is relatively nice as ramp up into the world of compiler development.
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#3Speaking of embedded systems, I have an old board, an offshoot of Zilog Z80 called Rabbit. I think recently Dave from EEVBlog took apart one of his ancient projects and I was floored to see a Rabbit. Talk about a left hook. Assuming this is Hacker News, I suspect someone probably knows what I’m talking about. The language used (called “Dynamic C”) has some unconventional additions, a kind of coroutine mechanism in addition to chaining functions to be called one after another in groups. It’s mostly C otherwise, so I suspect some macro shennanigans with interrupt vector priority for managing this coroutine stuff.
Anyhow, so I’ve got a bunch of .bin files around for it, no C source code, just straight assembly output ready to be flashed. And the text and data segments are often interwoven, each fetch being resolved to data or instruction in real time by the rabbit processor. So I’ve been thinking of sitting down, going through the assembly/processor manual for the board and just writing a board simulator hoping to get it back to source code by blackbox reversing in a sense. I’d have to rummage through JEDEC for the standard used by the EEPROM to figure out what pins it’s using there and the edge triggering sequences. Once I can execute it and see what registers and GPIOs are written when, I can probably figure out the original code path. Not sure if anyone has tips or guides or suggestions here.
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#4Speaking of embedded systems, I have an old board, an offshoot of Zilog Z80 called Rabbit. I think recently Dave from EEVBlog took apart one of his ancient projects and I was floored to see a Rabbit. Talk about a left hook. Assuming this is Hacker News, I suspect someone probably knows what I’m talking about. The language used (called “Dynamic C”) has some unconventional additions, a kind of coroutine mechanism in ad…
Any chance a decompiler like ghidra might get you part ways there?
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#5Speaking of embedded systems, I have an old board, an offshoot of Zilog Z80 called Rabbit. I think recently Dave from EEVBlog took apart one of his ancient projects and I was floored to see a Rabbit. Talk about a left hook. Assuming this is Hacker News, I suspect someone probably knows what I’m talking about. The language used (called “Dynamic C”) has some unconventional additions, a kind of coroutine mechanism in ad…
Any chance a decompiler like ghidra might get you part ways there?
The closest I came across was a Z80 simulator, I forget the name of it. But it allowed you to step through command by command giving you ability to query the processor state in a terminal.
So I don’t know if it would be easier trying to find this, and updating it to support rabbit, vs trying to wedge something into ghidra which itself is an undertaking of a behemoth platform. As far as I know ghidra does not have Z80 support.
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance a decompiler like ghidra might get you part ways there?
The closest I came across was a Z80 simulator, I forget the name of it. But it allowed you to step through command by command giving you ability to query the processor state in a terminal. So I don’t know if it would be easier trying to find this, and updating it to support rabbit, vs trying to wedge something into ghidra which itself is an undertaking of a behemoth platform. As far as I know ghidra does not have Z80…
Ghidra has Z80 support (based on the installation on my laptop), but I've never used it.
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance a decompiler like ghidra might get you part ways there?
The closest I came across was a Z80 simulator, I forget the name of it. But it allowed you to step through command by command giving you ability to query the processor state in a terminal. So I don’t know if it would be easier trying to find this, and updating it to support rabbit, vs trying to wedge something into ghidra which itself is an undertaking of a behemoth platform. As far as I know ghidra does not have Z80…
An Emu86.assembler.virtual_machine.Z8Machine (like MIPSMachine, RISCVMachine, and IntelMachine) could be stepped through in a notebook:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41576922
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance a decompiler like ghidra might get you part ways there?
The closest I came across was a Z80 simulator, I forget the name of it. But it allowed you to step through command by command giving you ability to query the processor state in a terminal. So I don’t know if it would be easier trying to find this, and updating it to support rabbit, vs trying to wedge something into ghidra which itself is an undertaking of a behemoth platform. As far as I know ghidra does not have Z80…
Ended up answering my own question. The Z88-DK[0] seems to be what I found. It supports most Rabbit processors, so I ran one of binaries through it and it spat out assembly my way which seems to make sense. Will have to run it through the simulator and see if I can get it to act like a microcontroller with setting voltage levels on particular pins.
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#9As is often the case, the title is unfortunately overloaded. I initially read this as writing code in the Scratch programming language[1] that compiles to assembly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)
Re: Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
#10As is often the case, the title is unfortunately overloaded. I initially read this as writing code in the Scratch programming language[1] that compiles to assembly. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)
I also misunderstood it in that manner.