YASM Release Notes

Milestone 1 (0.1.0)

Release Date: 3/19/02

Target Audience

Welcome to the very first milestone release of The YASM Modular Assembler. As this is only a milestone, it's really not for general use yet, so there are certain to be many bugs and missing features. This release is intended to provide a stable snapshot of YASM development as of 3/19/02. Its target audience includes people who:

• want to keep track of YASM's progress in terms of stability and feature set;
• want to test YASM with their own code to help test it;
• are just interested in the YASM project.

What's New

As this is the first release, essentially everything is new. The most important thing to be aware of with this release is that it's very limited:

• No preprocessor (a very early version of the YASM preprocessor YAPP is included, but it's not enabled nor recommended for standard assembly). Run code through NASM's preprocessor first.
• The optimizer is very basic 2-pass style (even so it should be slightly better than NASM's 2-pass optimizer).
• Only the bin and dbg object formats are available. "dbg" is the default; select bin with "-f bin" on the command line.
• Several major 16-bit things don't work: far calls, SEG and WRT being the primary pieces.

Important Differences from NASM

YASM defaults to reading from standard input and writing to standard output if no files are specified. When an input file is specified, YASM behaves like NASM.

Running YASM

Version Information:

yasm --version

Commandline Help:

yasm --help

Assemble test.asm to binary object file test:

yasm -f bin test.asm

Assemble test2.asm (which needs to be preprocessed) to debug object file test2.dbg:

nasm -e test2.asm | yasm -f dbg -o test2.dbg

Test YAPP on test3.asm:

yasm -e test3.asm