Assembly (Unix)

Assembly on Unix is largely the same between MacOS and Linux computers.

Compilation, Linking, and Execution

Compiler

You will first need a program to compile your assembly into machine code. Most common is the program nasm, which can be installed on OSX using homebrew with brew install nasm.

Your First Program

Create a file called hello_world.asm. Copy this into it's contents:

; ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Writes "Hello, World" to the console using only system calls. Runs on 64-bit macOS only.
; ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

        global    start                   ; nasm-specific way to define a location for the linker

        section   .text                   ; The .text section holds all the instructions for the
                                          ; assembler to execute.
start:                                ; The label that is referenced in the above global call
        mov       rax, 0x02000004         ; system call for write (copy param Y into param X)
        mov       rdi, 1                  ; file handle 1 is stdout
        mov       rsi, message            ; address of string to output
        mov       rdx, 13                 ; number of bytes (message is 13 chars long)
        syscall                           ; invoke operating system to do the write
        mov       rax, 0x02000001         ; system call for exit
        xor       rdi, rdi                ; exit code 0
        syscall                           ; invoke operating system to exit

        section   .data                   ; The .data section contains constants
message:                              ; The label referenced above
        db        "Hello, World", 10      ; note the newline at the end

Assembling Your Code

Assembling your code will translate it from the human readable assembly language into a file object. The following bash command will run nasm using the Mach-O 64bit object -file notation format used by the 64-bit version of MacOS and create -output hello_world.o.

$ nasm -f macho64 hello_world.asm -o hello_world.o

Linking Your File

Linking your newly created output file will pull all the needed libraries into a single executable. The following bash command will run ld, the GNU linker, and finish the creation of your executable.

$ ld -macosx_version_min 10.7.0 hello_world.o -o hello_world

The -macosx_version_min flag is added to remove the warning that is present without it. I read that it still builds fine without it, but that has not been true in my experience.

Executing Your File

$ ./hello_world
Hello, World

Running ./hello_world in bash should result in the message being displayed.

References

Incoming Links

Assembly

Last modified: 202401040446