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I’m interested in using clang as an x64 assembler, partly because it together with lldb seems to be the only way to debug assembly on a Mac. I wondered if someone could answer a few questions.

I can’t find any documentation about clang and assembly. Through experimentation, I have discovered that this works:

$ clang -g -c -x assembler hello.s
$ clang hello.o -o hello
$ ./hello
Hello, world!

Are these commands (and other relevant command line options) documented somewhere? Is the supported assembly syntax documented somewhere (it seems to support GAS syntax; is it reasonable to use the GAS manual as a reference?)?

Is this recommended? That is, is the integrated assembler intended to be used to write assembly code for a production system in this way, and is it reasonable to rely on it continuing to work in the future?

Thanks.

Mike

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Hi Mike,

Are these commands (and other relevant command line options) documented
somewhere?

The "-x assembler" shouldn't be needed. It's assumed for files ending
in .s. I don't think it's really documented anywhere, it's just that
.s files are one of the inputs Clang accepts.

Is the supported assembly syntax documented somewhere (it seems
to support GAS syntax; is it reasonable to use the GAS manual as a
reference?)?

It's broadly GNU syntax, though the concepts available in MachO differ
from ELF so some care is needed using the GNU manuals. For example on
AArch64, Linux you'd materialize a global address like this:

    adrp x0, some_var
    add x0, x0, :lo12:some_var

but targeting iOS you'd write:

    adrp x0, some_var@PAGE
    add x0, x0, some_var@PAGEOFF

Still, many/most GNU directives are cross-platform and we support
those in the way you'd expect (or we should do). And I'd also expect
GNU as to follow the same syntax if it was targeting Darwin.

I usually check Clang's output from a C file whenever I can't remember
what the right directives are.

Is this recommended? That is, is the integrated assembler intended to be
used to write assembly code for a production system in this way, and is it
reasonable to rely on it continuing to work in the future?

Finally I can give some good news! This is fully supported and pretty
stable. There's loads of assembly files out there in the wild which
no-one is going to break.

Cheers.

Tim.