[REQUEST] Support Intel assembly syntax

[pleroy]

OSACA only supports the AT&T assembly syntax. On Windows the Intel syntax is more common (especially with MSVC). There are tools out there that purport to convert one format to the other, but they are not quite ready for prime time, and it's also unclear if OSACA would need to tackle all the complexity of, say, C++ name mangling (I'd assume that a symbol is a symbol is a symbol and that there is no need to understand what it corresponds to).

The parser seems to be pretty well structured, so I would assume that supporting a new syntax amounts to adding a new parser subclass and would be a moderate amount of work.

If you are not interested in doing it yourselves, would you accept a contribution? (Not a commitment, just exploratory at this point.)

[JanLJL]

Hi @pleroy ,
I don't have any experience with the MSVC compiler, I would assume there should be a compiler flag to produce AT&T syntax out of the box, like the -masm=dialect flag for GCC?

Adding Intel syntax support to our parser is on our list of TODOs for a long time, however, we haven't prioritized it so far due to limited resources. If you want to contribute, we would be more than happy about a PR (even just an initial approach we can build on and discuss about together afterwards)!

[pleroy]

Hi @JanLJL -- Thanks for your quick reply.

I don't think that there is a flag to ask the MSVC compiler to produce the AT&T syntax (or if there is, it is well hidden). The relevant documentation is here and it doesn't even mention the syntax that it produces. Note incidentally that godbolt displays the Intel syntax, which is not a proof of anything, but a hint that maybe that's the only thing there is for MSVC.

I don't want to put the Intel parser on the critical path of some performance-sensitive code that I am writing, but the time will come when I will really want to do precise latency/throughput analysis. I'll try to split the work in relatively small chunks for ease of review.

[pleroy]

For the record I have started working on this. Far from complete, but I am making good progress. If someone is interested in taking a look, the work is happening in the fork https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/OSACA.