Show HN: Torque – A lightweight meta-assembler for any processor

benbridle.com

29 points by benbridle 6 hours ago

Hello everyone, I've been working on this project for the past few months.

Torque is a meta-assembler: instead of having an instruction set built into the assembler, you use macros to build up a small language that decribes an instruction set and then you use that to write your program. It's designed to work for any microcontroller/processor architecture, you build from the bit level upwards so there aren't any assumptions around word widths, instruction formats, or endianness.

I created Torque initially to write programs for a PIC microcontroller, after running into difficulties with the official assembler. I've also used it to write programs for the Z80 processor inside an old TRS-80 computer.

Let me know if you try it out or have any questions!

sitkack an hour ago

Super fun site!

Did you get inspiration from other assemblers or macro processors?

You have it running on a TRS-80, how does that work? I had no idea Rust could target a TRS-80.

I am getting hints of Forth, Lisp and TCL.

How would you go about laying out structs in memory?

I am sure you considered an internal DSL, what caused you go with something stand alone?

Any thoughts on adding a constraint solver, like Z3 and allowing end users to set constraints on things like the size of a jump.

I could see taking this an growing it into a compiler by making macro(macro(macros txt)))

Is there an internal IR?

Projects for inspiration

https://github.com/mattbierner/Template-Assembly

Specifying representations of machine instructions https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/256167.256225

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Specifying-representat...

Typed Assembly Language (TAL) https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/

And you haven't come across it, you are in for a treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/META_II has spawned a whole trove of clones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta

https://github.com/DalekBaldwin/clometa

anonzzzies 20 minutes ago

Well done! I write quite a bit of z80 for msx and this seems a nice addition.

zadkey 43 minutes ago

Excellent work man! I know some low level guys who would really appreciate this.