I am a Specialist Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) and Director of the Monmouth University Cybersecurity Research Center (CRC) at Monmouth University in central New Jersey. As a researcher, my focus is broadly on all things cybersecurity: from its intersections with…
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When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
Continuing on from our tiny snake game , let's explore more into how binaries work on Unix. Let's figure out how our programs come to obtain their argc and argv parameters.
I am on a number of different compiler mailing lists. One of those is the mailing list for the Tiny C Compiler . Imagine my surprise when a recent email mentioned our latest series and suggested trying a similar approach to improve the code generator in TCC. I was interested to see if there were any low-hanging fruit…
Today, I wanted to see if I could out-compile my C compiler. I added a hand-compiled assembly version of echo from our previous coding exercise and added a new make target, make asm , that will assemble it. Let's look at our hand-compiled assembly and compare it to our C compiler and ask whether or not it was worth it.
People appear to enjoy the blog posts about me porting different compilers to OpenBSD . What I would like to do for the next couple of posts beginning with this one is to take a step back and de-complexify these programs. Both the D compiler and the GNU Modula-2 compiler are highly complex pieces of software. But at…