The Project Maxwell assembler system

The JavaTM programming language is primarily used for platform-independent programming. Yet it also offers many productivity, maintainability and performance benefits for platform-specific functions, such as the generation of machine code. We have created reliable assemblers for SPARCTM , AMD64, IA32 and PowerPC which support all user mode and privileged instructions and with 64-bit mode support for all but the latter. These assemblers are generated as Java source code by our extensible assembler framework, which itself is written in the Java language. The assembler generator also produces javadoc comments that precisely specify the legal values for each operand. Our design is based on the Klein Assembler System written in Self. Assemblers are generated from a specification, as are table-driven disassemblers and unit tests. The specifications that drive the generators are expressed as Java language objects. Thus no extra parsers are needed and developers do not need to learn any ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: PPPJ
• Authors: Bernd Mathiske, Douglas N. Simon, Dave Ungar
• Keywords: Assemblers, Extensible Assembler Framework, Klein Assembler System, PPPJ 2006, Software Engineering