Hi, I've been thinking about going back to a project, but feeling a bit demotivated, so I wanted to ask here if there's any potential interest in it before deciding whether to work on it some more, or just drop it completely.

Basically, it's a library to provide a statically typed way to construct x86_64 instructions, and then emit the machine code for them.

So given a description of the instructions: https://github.com/BradleyChatha/jupiter/blob/master/views/isa/x86_64.txt

It'll spit out code based off of those descriptions: https://github.com/BradleyChatha/jupiter/blob/master/source/jupiter/x86_64/ir.d#L297

(You can then use something like SumType to easily encapsulate all the instructions under one type.)

It's currently missing support for encoding VEX and EVEX, which is probably the first thing I want to do if I go back to the project because I've already had to skip a decent amount of instructions due to not supporting it, and I'm only up to the letter C in terms of mnemonics ;_;

But my main question is, does anyone see this as useful at all? Is this a project worth pursuing? Is there anything in particular you'd like to see to make this useful?

(Completely useless but fun fact: This project was originally an assembler, before I decided I needed a library just to help describe the machine code so that the assembler itself could be made sanely, so once this is in a good state I might go back to making an assembler)

The very long term goal of this project was to provide a similar interface for different architectures. Again, is this something worth pursuing?

On Monday, 28 February 2022 at 00:34:50 UTC, SealabJaster wrote:

dmd could use an up to date table of X86 instructions to unify it's mishmash of partially complete X86 tables for various features.