question of the usage

[Peter Johnson]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, Yan Huang wrote:
> I am new to Yasm. I am wondering if yasm provides a library interface of
> assembling human-readable assembly instructions into binary code and
> disassembling binary code to human-readable assembly instructions
> (assuming all the tags used in the instructions have already been
> translated to numbers). I am expecting a well-defined APIs to use in my
> own program.

Yan,

Yasm provides half that solution; currently there's no disassembly 
support, but it does have a pretty complete API for assembly (see 
http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/wiki/ProgrammerReferences).  This 
documentation is for libyasm, the core library used by the "yasm" 
frontend.  If you want to parse a certain syntax (such as NASM syntax), 
it's probably easiest to look at the yasm.c frontend code 
(http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/browser/trunk/yasm/frontends/yasm/yasm.c) 
and trim it down to your needs.

For disassembly, I can direct you to a disassembler library called 
diStorm64 (http://www.ragestorm.net/distorm/).

Disassembly has a significantly simpler API compared to assembly; the 
reason assembly is much more complex is due to the need to handle user 
expressions, symbol tables, etc.  We're gradually working on trying to 
simplify the assembler API, but it's an evolutionary process.

Feel free to post here if you have any yasm API questions.

Peter