x86 Assembly on a Mac

Question

Does anyone know of any good tools (I\'m looking for IDEs) to write assembly on the Mac. Xcode is a little cumbersome to me.

Also, on the Intel Macs, can I use gener

Answer 1

Recently I wanted to learn how to compile Intel x86 on Mac OS X:

For nasm:

-o hello.tmp - outfile
-f macho - specify format
Linux - elf or elf64
Mac OSX - macho

For ld:

-arch i386 - specify architecture (32 bit assembly)
-macosx_version_min 10.6 (Mac OSX - complains about default specification)
-no_pie (Mac OSX - removes ld warning)
-e main - specify main symbol name (Mac OSX - default is start)
-o hello.o - outfile

For Shell:

./hello.o - execution

One-liner:

nasm -o hello.tmp -f macho hello.s && ld -arch i386 -macosx_version_min 10.6 -no_pie -e _main -o hello.o hello.tmp && ./hello.o

Let me know if this helps!

I wrote how to do it on my blog here:

http://blog.burrowsapps.com/2013/07/how-to-compile-helloworld-in-intel-x86.html

For a more verbose explanation, I explained on my Github here:

https://github.com/jaredsburrows/Assembly

Answer 2

Don't forget that unlike Windows, all Unix based system need to have the source before destination unlike Windows

On Windows its:

mov $source , %destination

but on the Mac its the other way around.

Answer 3

For a nice step-by-step x86 Mac-specific introduction see http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/assembly-hello-world-for-os-x. The other links I’ve tried have some non-Mac pitfalls.