[yasm-announce] ANNC: Yasm 0.5.0

[Peter Johnson]

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Yasm 0.5.0, the fifth 
milestone release of the Yasm Modular Assembler.

New features in this release (compared to 0.5.0rc2):

   - Support for arithmetic on single-character constants.
   - Support for OUTPUT_FORMAT as an alias for YASM_OBJFMT.
   - A couple of other bugfixes.

New features in this release (compared to 0.5.0rc1):

   - Support for CodeView 8.0 source debugging (as used by Visual Studio
     2005).
   - Fixed -I support to properly handle relative paths (now the search
     pattern is essentially identical to most C compilers). This change is
     backwards incompatible (to both NASM and earlier Yasm versions), but
     is much more consistent.
   - Standard macros that provide version information: __YASM_MAJOR__,
     __YASM_MINOR__, __YASM_SUBMINOR__, __YASM_BUILD__, __YASM_VERSION_ID__
     and __YASM_VER__.

New features in this release (compared to 0.4.0) include:

   - Aliases for AMD64 object formats: "win64" and "elf64" (these
     automatically set the machine to "amd64").
   - "x64" alias for Win64 object format (for easier use with Visual
     Studio).
   - DWARF2 debugging format (enable with "-g dwarf2").
   - GAS parser good enough to take GCC output for both AMD64 and 32-bit
     x86 (including DWARF2 debug information).
   - Dozens of bugfixes in x86 and AMD64 support.
   - Specifying "amd64" as the machine (or using a 64-bit object format)
     automatically sets BITS 64.

Known issues with this release include:

   - List output is buggy and often outright wrong.
   - The optimizer is a very basic 2-pass style and generates inefficient
     (large) code at times.
   - The binary object format does not yet support sections other than
     .text, .bss, and .data, unlike newer versions of NASM (see Trac bug
     #71).

Release Notes for 0.5.0:

http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/Release0.5.0

Downloads from the Yasm website include .tar.gz source (for Unix systems) and 
Win64, Win32, CygWin, and DOS executables:

http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/Download

Please download, test, and tinker, and most importantly, send comments and bug 
reports!  Thanks to all those who submitted bug reports and contributed code 
for this release.  More developers are welcome to join us as well.

Sorry for the delay in this release; I was hoping to get the new optimizer 
in but ended up being convinced it was safer to move such a major feature 
to the next release.

Thanks,
Peter Johnson and the other Yasm developers
<peter at tortall.net>

Yasm development discussion is at <yasm-devel at tortall.net>.