go away spammer

Author Topic: new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?  (Read 3902 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline z.s.tar.gzTopic starter

  • Supreme Robot
  • *****
  • Posts: 540
  • Helpful? 5
  • Linux Guru
new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?
« on: February 24, 2010, 11:00:28 AM »
I don't know how many people actually use assembly anymore so I just wanted to get a feel before I started working on making a new compiler.

When I say "new" I really mean I'm going to pick up the AVRA project that was abandoned in 2007 and change it up a little.
Save yourself the typing. Just call me Zach.

Offline HyperNerd

  • Robot Overlord
  • ****
  • Posts: 139
  • Helpful? 5
  • N3rd1n80r
Re: new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2010, 01:39:57 PM »
I don't really think that many people use assembly anymore as its far too complicated for a beginner to learn.

Saying that however, I can think of some projects I saw on YouTube which use assembly because it allows much greater control over timing and the like.

I tried to learn assembly when I first got into PICs, but soon gave up as after around a full day of failing, I achieved a flashing LED on a breadboard.

I then gave MikroBasic a try, and within 2 hours, had an electronic dice and a UART example set up. Much more success!

I can understand why some coders prefer assembly, as they can optimise their code more then if the same code was generated with an IDE, but I don't think it is really worth the effort of making a "new" compiler for assembly language.

 -HyperNerd
There are 10 types of people in the world - those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Offline GearMotion

  • Supreme Robot
  • *****
  • Posts: 489
  • Helpful? 24
  • Two decades+ of Embedded Design
    • CircuitGizmos
Re: new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2010, 01:40:57 PM »
The subject of making a BASIC for the msp430 came up on the msp430 list. My reply was to make an assembler with some BASIC-like augmented commends. Here is what I posted. I think it would be valid for an AVR assembler, too.

> Here is what you should do, if it was up to me to decide what you
> should do with your time. :-)
>
> I used an assembler for the z80 once that was 'augmented' for lack of
> a better term. It was a macro assembler that had some nice macro
> functions to it.
>
> It still let you write plain assembly language code: (I'm making up a
> little syntax here)
>
>     Load A, 15
>     Mov A, PortB
>
> But it also let you write loops that translated into assembly: (I
> don't remember the exact syntax.)
>
>     DB loopy
>
>     For loopy = 1 to 100
>
>      Load A, loopy
>      Mov A, PortB
>
>     Next loopy
>
> A register was pushed/popped to support the macro.
>
> It had string functions and other "high level" constructs that would
> assist in writing assembly. It was an assembly/BASIC mix. I can't tell
> you how easy it became to write a lot of assembly. The output of this
> actually fed into a 'regular' assembler. This was all DOS-based, mind
> you, because it was about a hundred years ago when I wrote z80 code
> for money. My DOS text editor shelled out to run a batch file that
> called both the macro converter and assembler.
>
> I used this z80 basic/macro program a lot and I think I only utilized
> half of what it could do. IIRC you could use the macro language to
> manipulate 8/16/32 bits. Also single bit functions. I used the
> for/next and other constructs a lot. I think there was a limit on the
> depth that you could nest them, like 8 or so. It actually taught me
> structured programming - somewhat. I had to at least plan...
>
> I remember it was easy to make a subroutine that passed parameters, so
> I made a lot more subroutines because of that. And reading data out of
> an array (therefore incrementing pointers) was so easy that my code
> there never had bugs.

Offline billhowl

  • Supreme Robot
  • *****
  • Posts: 376
  • Helpful? 32
  • Your success is in your hands.
Re: new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2010, 07:43:22 PM »
There is a active AVR assembler call "Gerd's AVR assembler"
http://www.avr-asm-tutorial.net/gavrasm/index_en.html

Why start a new one?

Offline z.s.tar.gzTopic starter

  • Supreme Robot
  • *****
  • Posts: 540
  • Helpful? 5
  • Linux Guru
Re: new avr assembly compiler - is there any demand?
« Reply #4 on: February 26, 2010, 12:26:13 PM »
Like I said I'm not really starting a new one just picking up where an old one left off.
I was going to pretty much fix some bugs and add new device compatabilites, but I think I may also add some libraries in too.

This is just something I was going to do for myself and I was seeing if anyone else was interested.

I guess I'm just a dying breed of asm developers. :-\
Save yourself the typing. Just call me Zach.

 


Get Your Ad Here