https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19389

https://flatassembler.net/download.php

But then I reread it and realised I was not paying attention to the usecase. It's about making it easy to write assemblers. So this isn't for your Arms and RISC-Vs it's for your random niche microcontrollers where the vendor-provided toolchain kinda sucks.

Seems cool!

I've experienced a couple of under-documented assemblers in my time. In neither case did this turn out to be that much of a problem in practice, but I guess I just don't write that much assembly.

Did you get inspiration from other assemblers or macro processors?

You have it running on a TRS-80, how does that work? I had no idea Rust could target a TRS-80.

I am getting hints of Forth, Lisp and TCL.

How would you go about laying out structs in memory?

I am sure you considered an internal DSL, what caused you go with something stand alone?

Any thoughts on adding a constraint solver, like Z3 and allowing end users to set constraints on things like the size of a jump.

I could see taking this an growing it into a compiler by making macro(macro(macros txt)))

Is there an internal IR?

Projects for inspiration

https://github.com/mattbierner/Template-Assembly

Specifying representations of machine instructions https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/256167.256225

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Specifying-representat...

Typed Assembly Language (TAL) https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/

And you haven't come across it, you are in for a treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II has spawned a whole trove of clones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta

https://github.com/DalekBaldwin/clometa

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KINIAgRpkDA

I remember there were a few other meta-assemblers I came across in the 80s-90s, so this is definitely not "unchartered territory", but it's good to see another one show up.

Of course, in the other direction there are meta-disassemblers used for analysis in tools like Ghidra.

Also, some of the links in the table of contents of the documentation does not seems to work.

Pretty cool project!

Would be interesting to target the RISC CPU of https://www.projectoberon.net with it.

"Assemblers tend to be poorly documented"

I wish everything in programming was as good documented as assemblers and ISAs.