The Epsilon Assembler (
easm) is a Win32 assembler whose main focus is Windows application development. I am developing easm as my final year degree project and I wanted to introduce the project to a wider audience and generate some interest.
The assembler is still in very early stages and currently only supports a small percentage of the overall design. In saying this however, easm is capable of creating some interesting things in its current state. My aim is to develop the project, even after it has served the educational purpose that it was created for, to be a fully functional assembler with little to no limits.
I have released a BETA version of easm on the project website (
http://e-asm.org) in the hope that people will test the assembler and report any potential bugs. Bug reporting is particularly important at this stage as I need some evidence that the application has been tested.
Bugs are reported on the project website and require a login to do so (to avoid abuse of the bug reporting system). If you require a login, just complete the short form (found in the 'Bugs' section of the site) and I'll add the login asap. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated and be a huge help.
The website also contains design documents, explanations of relevant concepts, easm source code samples and the online documentation for the easm syntax (
http://e-asm.org/Docs)
The easm syntax is essentially x86 assembler, but with a unique touch which aims to make it more manageable and readable, take the following Hello World example:
subsystem cui
section imports
from msvcr70.dll import printf
from kernel32.dll import ExitProcess
section constants
const NULL = 00h
section data
string szOutput = "Hello World\n"
section code
call printf (&szOutput)
call ExitProcess (NULL)
easm makes extensive use of Win32 'imports' in order to import functionality from existing code, residing in dynamic link libraries. It is possible to import pretty much any function from any DLL (given its name) and then invoke the function in easm. This produces a huge library of inherited code, much like other languages have access to.
As a final example, the application below was recently created using easm and shows that easm is capable of the development of a fully functional application (even though it is tedious at this point). The program is a simple HTTP downloader, which saves a remote file to a local file given the fully qualified URL.
[attach=#1][/attach]
http://e-asm.org/samples/http.easmhttp://e-asm.org/http.exeAlthough easm is intended for the Microsoft Windows platform... there has be some success in running the assembler and applications produced by the assembler under Linux systems with the aid of the Windows Emulator WINE. I have not tried this myself, but I am aware that the early examples in easm run fine when using WINE.
Thanks a lot, Martin.