Linux support

[AnErrupTion]

Hi!

First of all, thanks for your amazing work! It's really nice to be able to run an assembler directly in C# code! :D

Second, I'd like to know if Linux support is planned. That is, detecting the OS having a FASM binary for that instead of just assuming the OS being Windows. It'd be a really nice touch in my opinion.

[Sewer56]

There are fasmDLL options for Linux, yeah, it's something I can certainly do down the road. Maybe also make it so it doesn't drop the other platforms' DLLs when not necessary.

Just a matter of testing it; I'd ever need to rely on CI/CD to test the code or pull up a virtual machine. A project I might be working on soon (no guarantees though) might make use of Linux/OSX support so it's not our of question.

[sanny-io]

@Sewer56 any updates? I am interested in working on this if not. Would a PR be welcome?

[Sewer56]

It's not possible (without a rewrite of FASM itself) to my knowledge, I actually tried a few months ago. Here's what I remember:

First of all, you have to port fasmDLL itself to Linux. It turns out that while fasm has actual Linux binaries, there is not a dynamically linked .so file that you can create.

So I wrote some assembly to get exports working on Linux, however; it's still not possible to use. Problem is, the code is not relocatable, and there's no mechanism (that I'm aware of) that's equivalent to Windows' .reloc section, which can be used to relocate offsets within the binary at load time. So even as library, it has to be loaded at fixed memory address which is problematic.

[Sewer56]

Here's the code from my aforementioned experiment:

FasmDLL.zip

I lifted out all the DLL stuff back then, cleanly.
So you should be able to build DLL against the latest FASM sources.

I have no idea how I could get it to relocate with a .so file.

I don't remember the exact build steps for this, but I believe you extract the SOURCE folder to FASM's source code, then assemble FASM.ASM/FASMX64.ASM (in the DLL folder) for your desired target platform.