SIC/XE Assembler

Yet another SIC/XE assembler.

Features

• Support SIC/XE instructions and directives.
• Support control sections.
• Support program blocks.
• Support literals.
• Support symbol-defining directive (EQU).
• Support syntax checking.
• Support basic semantic checking.

Usage

You'll need the latest stable version of Rust to build the assembler.

$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/sicxe-cli <source-file>

Architecture

The assembler is generally divided into 4 parts:

• Tokenizer (Just remove comments and split the line into tokens)
• Parser (Parse the tokens into Frames)
• Transformer(s) (Transform a sequence of Frames into another sequence of Frames while resolving directives and symbols)
• Optimizer (Optimize the object code layout)

Frames

There are 3 types of frames:

pub enum FrameInner {
    Instruction(Instruction),
    Directive(Directive),
    ObjectRecord(ObjectRecord),
}

• Instruction: Represents an instruction (e.g. LDA, J, JSUB, etc.)
• Directive: Represents a directive (e.g. START, END, BYTE, WORD, etc.)
• ObjectRecord: Represents an object record (e.g. T, M, E, etc.)

Transformer(s)

• Section Splitter: It split the source program into control sections, and treats each section a separate program that can be passed to other transformers.
• Block Rearranger: It rearranges the frames' layout based on the program blocks configuration.
• Literal Dumper: It dumps the literals into BYTE directives.
• Symbol Resolver: It resolves the symbols and replaces them with their addresses.
• Translator: It translates the frames into object records.

Optimizer

It optimizes the object code layout to make it compact as possible.

Copyright & License

© 2023 Jacob Lin

Distributed under the AGPL-3.0 License. See LICENSE for more information.