Is assembler portable between Linux distros?

Question

Is a program shipped in assembler format portable between Linux distributions (modulo CPU architecture differences)?

Here\'s the background to my question: I\'m work

Answer 1

At a very high level, the ABI consists of { instruction set, system calls, binary format, libraries }.

Distribution as .s may free you from the binary format. This is still rather pointless, because you are fixed to a particular ISA and still need to use libraries and/or make system calls. Libraries vary from distribution to distribution (although this isn't really that bad, especially if you just use libc) and syscalls vary from OS to OS.

Answer 2

It's basically 20 years since I last bootstrapped a C compiler. At the level of compilers, the differences between Linux distributions are minimal.

The much more important reason for going LLVM is cross-platform; if you're not writing some intermediate language, your compiler will be extremely difficult to retarget for different processors. And seeing as, on my laptop, I have compilers for x86, x86_64, two kinds of MIPS, PowerPC, ARM and AVR... you see where I'm going? I can compile multiple languages for most of those targets too (only C for AVR).

Answer 3

You might want to check out LLVM before going down this particular path. It might make your life a lot easier, as it provides a low level virtual machine that makes a lot of hard stuff just work and has been very popular.