SIsimias·Jun 9, 2020
I've followed the discussion regarding how ASM should be integrated in Rust over the past few years, the idea of integrating the ASM syntax more tightly with Rust has been brought up. Basically one could treat assembly as an ad-hoc domain specific language with its own parsing rules that would make it more like a first class citizen instead of a magical character string. I've actually implemented a very simplistic MIPS assembler in a similar way for emulation purposes: https://github.com/simias/rustation/blob/master/src/parallel...
I think they were absolutely right not to go down that route, because then you have to basically specify this syntax for every possible architecture targeted by Rust. Integrating ASM in the language syntax is fine if you only care about x86, but it's going to be a mess if you want to support MIPS, ARM32, AARCH6
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4, Sparc and whatnot because the ASM dialects for each of these architectures have special bespoke syntax to deal with various quirks of the underlying ISA. MIPS has special syntax to load the top and bottom half of an address as well as dealing with delay slots (.noreorder), ARM has special sugar for PC-relative addressing etc...
Importing that baggage into Rust would be a fool's errand IMO. It would also make it harder both to port Rust to new architectures and to transfer existing assembly code into Rust since it would require adjusting the syntax.
I'm very happy with Rust's current approach, it's a good middle ground IMO.