July 30, 2023

Assembly Language - A development system

I am old school. This means I use the command line for things like this. I run linux (specifically Fedora 38 on my Intel X86_64 desktop). I use the vim editor and good old Gnu make to manage my projects. These are a given with any basic linux install.

But we need an ARM assembler. You may be shocked to learn that I just use the Gnu C compiler to handle ARM assembly files. I run:

arm-linux-gnu-gcc
When I feed it a xyz.S file, it knows what to do -- no doubt running arm-linux-gnu-as behind the scenes. The Fedora packages to install are:
gcc-arm-linux-gnu
binutils-arm-linux-gnu
If you just "dnf install gcc-arm-linux-gnu" it will pull in binutils (which includes "as") as a dependency, and that is what I recommend doing.

What about Windows?

No doubt there are any number of ways to set up a development system on windows. I won't try to tell you about something I have never done.

What about Arduino?

These are not the droids we are looking for. Arduino is basically a sugar-coated front end to C++ development. I know of no way to use it for the kind of assembly language projects we are going to tackle.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]