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by giovannibajo1
1596 days ago
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I generally advise against using bass for home-brew development. Bass is not a very well thought out assembler. I've never used it for 65816, but for other architectures like MIPS has some serious design issues that cause invalid code to be silently accepted by default, which is normally a disaster when it gets to debugging. For MIPS at least, one of the completely wrong design decision has been to map basic register indices to raw numbers. For instance, in bass, this is a valid instruction: add 2, 4, 5
which means "add register 4 and 5 together and write the result in register 2". Normally, one would write that line with the register aliases: add v0, a0, a1
The problem comes with the fact that MIPS has also a "addi" (add immediate instruction) that you would use like this: addi v0, a0, 5
"add the immediate value 5 to a0 and store the result in v0". So I guess the problem is clear: what happens if you instead write: add v0, a0, 5
There are two possible reasonable outcomes: either the assembler should reject the above line as invalid, or it should silently convert it to "addi" which is what GNU as does for instance. Instead, with bass, the above is a perfectly valid line which gets assembled to the same of "add v0, a0, a1", which basically silently generates wrong code.I think bass was a quick hack that overgrew its intended goal. I suggest to use something more mature. |
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So first thing first: There _is_ and community fork. Url had been spammed allready. Yes we are active. To be honest, bass is more active then it probably ever had been before. Next days we will also launch a project page (url: www.basm.dev). And yes .. that near passed away was as least a shock for us. But its also the reason why we took it up.
Now about @giovannibajo1 very valid statement: Yes. Until recently that would had been true. Syntax may, or may not always be optimal. It's too sad that so far no Issue ticket, or Discord Message had reached me about this thoughts. In the end its a community project. All I can say at this point is that the pure assembly syntax is to 100% fluid. You can mix it your own flavor. To be honest I never did MIPS using bass myself. But I would love to chat about "how a clean syntax should looks like".
Feel welcome.