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by Asm2D
959 days ago
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The reason why it's written in C++ is to make it practical. I understand why some people would want it in C, but honestly I have never seen a nice JIT assembler library written in C - I saw few incomplete assemblers in C before as part of other projects, but it was usually ugly code full of macros, so no proper C API to interface with anyway. I think that asmjit's biggest strength is in its completeness and performance, so it can be used to generate code in a sub-millisecond time, which higher level code generators such as LLVM don't offer. |
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asmjit is great if you're writing a fast JIT and want to write C++, or can tolerate a C++ requirement. If you're writing a compiler in any other language, requiring C++ is a burden that may be insurmountable. What I'm lamenting is the lack of a widely used, decent C library for generating x86 and ARM code, which doesn't seem to exist, nor does asmjit fill that gap.
> I think that asmjit's biggest strength is in its completeness and performance, so it can be used to generate code in a sub-millisecond time, which higher level code generators such as LLVM don't offer.
Not everyone cares about sub-millsecond performance for code generation. It's easier to generate GCC syntax ASM and shell out to `asm` or `cc` than to write bindings to asmjit and interface from a different language, and the performance is fine because lowering your AST into an IR that can be used to generate asm either as text or the input to asmjit is a much bigger bottleneck.