NASM Wishlist ============= Numbers on right hand side are version numbers that it would be nice to have this done by. ? means I haven't looked at it yet. - Create a binary RDF tools distribution. Should probably be distributed 0.98 seperately. - Check misc/ide.cfg into RCS as Watcom IDE enhancement thingy. 0.98 (nop@dlc.fi) - Package the Linux Assembler HOWTO. 0.98 - AMD 3dNow extensions need documenting. 0.98 - prototypes of lrotate don't match in test/*. Fix. 0.98 - Build djgpp binaries for 0.98 onwards. Look into PMODE/W as a stub 0.98 - it might be a lot better than CWSDPMI. It's in PMW133.ZIP. - Fix `%error' giving error messages twice. 0.99 Not especially important, as changes planned for 1.1x below will make the preprocessor be only called once. - Sort out problems with OBJ: 0.99 * TLINK32 doesn't seem to like SEGDEF32 et al. So for that, we should avoid xxx32 records wherever we can. * However, didn't we change _to_ using xxx32 at some stage? Try to remember why and when. * Apparently Delphi's linker has trouble with two or more globals being defined inside a PUBDEF32. Don't even know if it _can_ cope with a PUBDEF16. * Might need extra flags. *sigh* - Symbol table output may possibly be useful. 0.99 Ken Martwick (kenm@efn.org) wants the following format: labelname type offset(hex) repetition count Possibly include xref addresses after repetition count? - There are various other bugs in outelf.c that make certain kinds 0.99 of relocation not work. See zbrown.asm. Looks like we may have to do a major rewrite of parts of it. Compare some NASM code output with equivalent GAS code output. Look at the ELF spec. Generally fix things. - NASM is currently using a kludge in ELF that involves defining 0.99 a symbol at a zero absolute offset. This isn't needed, as the documented solution to the problem that this solves is to use SHN_UNDEF. - Debug information, in all formats it can be usefully done in. 0.99 * including line-number record support. * "George C. Lindauer" wants to have some say in how this goes through. * Andrew Crabtree wants to help out. - Think about a line-continuation character. 0.99 - Consider allowing declaration of two labels on the same line, syntax 'label1[:] label2[:] ... instruction'. Need to investigate feasibility. 0.99 - Quoting of quotes by doubling them, in string and char constants. 0.99 - Two-operand syntax for SEGMENT/SECTION macro to avoid warnings 0.99 of ignored section parameters on reissue of __SECT__. Or maybe skip the warning if the given parameters are identical to what was actually stored. Investigate. - Apparently we are not missing a PSRAQ instruction, because it doesn't exist. Check that it doesn't exist as an undocumented instruction, or something stupid like that. 0.99 - Any assembled form starting 0x80 can also start 0x82. ndisasm 1.00 should know this. New special code in instruction encodings, probably. - Pointing an EQU at an external symbol now generates an error. There 1.05 may be a better way of handling this; we should look into it. Ideally, the label mechanism should be changed to cope with one label being declared relative to another - that may work, but could be a pain to implement (or is it? it may be easy enough that you just need to declare a new offset in the same segment...) This should be done before v1.0 is released. There is a comment regarding this in labels.c, towards the end of the file, which discusses ways of fixing this. - nested %rep used to cause a panic. Now a more informative error 1.10 message is produced. This problem whould be fixed before v1.0. See comment in switch() statement block for PP_REP in do_directive() in preproc.c (line 1585, or thereabouts) - Contribution: zgraeme.tar contains improved hash table routines ? contributed by Graeme Defty for use in the label manager. - Contribution: zsyntax.zip contains a syntax-highlighting mode for ? NASM, for use with the Aurora text editor (??). - Contribution: zvim.zip contains a syntax-highlighting mode for ? NASM, for use with vim. - Contribution: zkendal1.zip and zkendal2.zip contain Kendall ? Bennett's () alternative syntax stuff, providing an alternative syntax mode for NASM which allows a macro set to be written that allows the same source files to be assembled with NASM and TASM. - Add the UD2 instruction. ? - Add the four instructions documented in 24368901.pdf (Intel's own ? document). - Some means of avoiding MOV memoffs,EAX which apparently the 1.10? Pentium pairing detector thinks modifies EAX. Similar means of choosing instruction encodings where necessary. - The example of ..@ makes it clear that a ..@ label isn't just ? local, but doesn't make it clear that it isn't just global either. - hpa wants an evaluator operator for ceil(log2(x)). ? - Extra reloc types in ELF: R_386_16 type 20, PC16 is 21, 8 is 22, PC8 is 23. Add support for the 16s at least. ? - Lazy section creation or selective section output, in COFF/win32 ? at least and probably other formats: don't bother to emit a section if it contains no data. Particularly the default auto-created section. We believe zero-length sections crash at least WLINK (in win32). - Make the flags field in `struct itemplate' in insns.h a long ? instead of an int. - Implement %ifref to check whether a single-line macro has ever been ? expanded since (last re) definition. Or maybe not. We'll see. - add pointer to \k{insLEAVE} and \k{insENTER} in chapters about ? mixed-language programming. - Some equivalent to TASM's GLOBAL directive, ie something which ? defines a symbol as external if it doesn't end up being defined but defines it as public if it does end up being defined. - Documentation doesn't explain about C++ name mangling. ? - see if BITS can be made to do anything sensible in obj (eg set the ? default new-segment property to Use32). - OBJ: coalesce consecutive offset and segment fixups for the same ? location into full-32bit-pointer fixups. This is apparently necessary because some twazzock in the PowerBASIC development team didn't deign to support the OMF spec the way the rest of the world sees it. - Allow % to be separated from the rest of a preproc directive, for ? alternative directive indentation styles. - __DATE__, __TIME__, and text variants of __NASM_MAJOR__ and ? __NASM_MINOR__. - Warn on TIMES combined with multi-line macros. TIMES gets applied 1.00 to first line only - should bring to users' attention. - Re-work the evaluator, again, with a per-object-format fixup 1.10 routine, so as to be able to cope with section offsets "really" being pure numbers; should be able to allow at _least_ the two common idioms TIMES 510-$ DB 0 ; bootsector MOV AX,(PROG_END-100H)/16 ; .COM TSR Would need to call the fixup throughout the evaluator, and the fixup would have to be allowed to return UNKNOWN on pass one if it had to. (_Always_ returning UNKNOWN on pass one, though a lovely clean design, breaks the first of the above examples.) - Preprocessor identifier concatenation? 1.10 - Arbitrary section names in `bin'. ? Is this necessary? Is it even desirable? - Ability to read from a pipe. Obviously not useful under dos, so 1.10 memory problems with storing entire input file aren't a problem either. Related topic: file caching under DOS/32 bit... 1.10? maybe even implement discardable buffers that get thrown away when we get a NULL returned from malloc(). Only really useful under DOS. Think about it. Another related topic: possibly spool out the pre-processed 1.10? stuff to a file, to avoid having to re-process it. Possible problems with preprocessor values not known on pass 1? Have a look... Or maybe we can spool out a pre-parsed version...? 1.10 Need to investigate feasibility. Does the results from the parser change from pass 1 to pass 2? Would it be feasible to alter it so that the parser returns an invariant result, and this is then processed afterwards to resolve label references, etc? - Subsection support? ? - A good ALIGN mechanism, similar to GAS's. GAS pads out space by 1.10? means of the following (32-bit) instructions: 8DB42600000000 lea esi,[esi+0x0] 8DB600000000 lea esi,[esi+0x0] 8D742600 lea esi,[esi+0x0] 8D7600 lea esi,[esi+0x0] 8D36 lea esi,[esi] 90 nop It uses up to two of these instructions to do up to 14-byte pads; when more than 14 bytes are needed, it issues a (short) jump to the end of the padded section and then NOPs the rest. Come up with a similar scheme for 16 bit mode, and also come up with a way to use it - internal to the assembler, so that programs using ALIGN don't knock over preprocess-only mode. Also re-work the macro form so that when given one argument in a code section it calls this feature. - Possibly a means whereby FP constants can be specified as ? immediate operands to non-FP instructions. * Possible syntax: MOV EAX,FLOAT 1.2 to get a single-precision FP constant. Then maybe MOV EAX,HI_FLOAT 1.2 and MOV EAX,LO_FLOAT 1.2 to get the two halves of a double-precision one. Best to ignore extended-precision in case it bites. * Alternatively, maybe MOV EAX,FLOAT(4,0-4,1.2) to get bytes 0-4 (ie 0-3) of a 4-byte constant. Then HI_FLOAT is FLOAT(8,4-8,x) and LO_FLOAT is FLOAT(8,0-4,x). But this version allows two-byte chunks, one-byte chunks, even stranger chunks, and pieces of ten-byte reals to be bandied around as well. - A UNION macro might be quite cool, now that ABSOLUTE is sane ? enough to be able to handle it. - An equivalent to gcc's ## stringify operator, plus string ? concatenation, somehow implemented without undue ugliness, so as to be able to do `%include "/my/path/%1"' in a macro, or something similar... - Actually _do_ something with the processor, privileged and 1.10 undocumented flags in the instruction table. When this happens, consider allowing PMULHRW to map to either of the Cyrix or AMD versions? - Maybe NEC V20/V30 instructions? ? - Yet more object formats. * Possibly direct support for .EXE files? 1.10 - Symbol map in binary format. Format-specific options... 1.10? - REDESIGN: Think about EQU dependency, and about start-point 1.20? specification in OBJ. Possibly re-think directive support. - Think about a wrapper program like gcc? Possibly invent a _patch_ 2.00? for gcc so that it can take .asm files on the command line? - If a wrapper happens, think about adding an option to cause the ? resulting executable file to be executed immediately, thus allowing NASM source files to have #!... (probably silly) - Multi-platform support? If so: definitely Alpha; possibly Java ? byte code; probably ARM/StrongARM; maybe Sparc; maybe Mips; maybe Vax. Perhaps Z80 and 6502, just for a laugh? - Consider a 'verbose' option that prints information about the resulting ? object file onto stdout.