DynASM is awesome

As part of my ‘community bonding’ period, I’ve taken it upon me to write a small series of blog posts explaining the various parts I’ll be using to add a JIT compiler to MoarVM. Today I’d like to focus on the DynASM project that originates from the awesome LuaJIT project.

DynASM is probably best described as an run-time assembler in two parts. One part is written in lua and acts as a source preprocessor. It takes a C source file in which special directives are placed that take the form of assembly-language statements. Here is a fully worked-out example. These are then transformed into run-time calls that construct the desired bytecode. The generated bytecode can be called like you would a regular function pointer.

DynASM has no run-time dependencies. But to run the preprocessor you will need lua as well as the Lua BitOp module (also from the luajit project). The run-time part is contained within the headers. DynASM is licensed under the MIT license and supports many different architectures, including x86, x64, ppc, and arm. DynASM also intergrates neatly into a Makefile-based build.

In many respects DynASM is an ideal tool for this particular job. However, it also has a few drawbacks. The most important of these is the lack of documentation. With the exception of a few scattered blog posts , there is barely any documentation at all. For many of the simple operations, this is sufficient. For the more complex things, such as dynamic register selection, or dynamic labels, it seems there is no other option than to ask directly. (FWIW, the 'dynamic registers' question was asked an answered only two days ago on the luajit mailing list). However, I think the benefits of using DynASM outwheigh these issues.

For my next blog, I'll be looking at the MoarVM machine model and bytecode set, especially in relation to x64. Hope to see you then.

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