Open Watcom Assembler or WASM is an x86 assembler produced by

Watcom Watcom International Corporation was a software company, which was founded in 1981 by Wes Graham and Ian McPhee. Founding staff (Fred Crigger, Jack Schueler and McPhee) were formerly members of Professor Graham's Computer Systems Group at the Uni ...

, based on the Watcom Assembler found in

Watcom C/C++ compiler Watcom C/C++ (currently Open Watcom C/C++) is an integrated development environment (IDE) product from Watcom International Corporation for the C, C++, and Fortran programming languages. Watcom C/C++ was a commercial product until it was disco ...

and Watcom FORTRAN 77. Further development is being done on the 32- and 64-bit JWASM project,. which more closely matches the syntax of Microsoft's assembler. There are experimental assemblers for PowerPC,

Alpha AXP Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers ( ...

, and MIPS.

Technical details

Assembler

*Native support for output formats Intel OMF output formats *Supports Intel x86 (Pentium MMX, Pentium III-4, 3DNow!, SSE and SSE2) instruction sets. *Supports Microsoft macro assembler (

MASM The Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) is an x86 assembler that uses the Intel syntax for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Beginning with MASM 8.0, there are two versions of the assembler: One for 16-bit & 32-bit assembly sources, and another (ML64) ...

) 5 and 6 syntax (incomplete).Open Watcom website: Assembler

Disassembler

There is an associated Watcom

disassembler A disassembler is a computer program that translates machine language into assembly language—the inverse operation to that of an assembler. A disassembler differs from a decompiler, which targets a high-level language rather than an assembly l ...

, ''wdis''. The assembler does not have listing facilities; instead the use of ''wdis'' for generating listings is recommended. wdis can read OMF, COFF and ELF object files and PE and ELF executables. It supports 16-bit and 32-bit x86 instruction set including MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3. Support for PowerPC, Alpha AXP, MIPS, and SPARC V8 instruction sets is also built in.

WASM forks

JWasm

JWasm is a fork of Wasm originated by Japheth with following features: *Native support for output formats Intel OMF (16/32-bit), MS Coff (32-bit and 64-bit), Elf (32-bit and 64-bit), Bin and DOS MZ. *Precompiled JWasm binaries are available for DOS, Windows and Linux. For OS/2 and FreeBSD, makefiles are supplied. *Supports Intel x86 (8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro), x86-64 instruction sets with

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it shoul ...

(MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3, SSE4.1/2 (since Jwasm), AVX (since JWasm 2.06), VMX ( Intel VT-x; AMD SVM, the latter though already implemented, currently still inactive) extensions (since JWasm 2.09)). *JWasm is written in C. The source is portable and has successfully been tested with Open Watcom, MS VC, GCC and more. *On Windows, JWasm can be used with both Win32Inc and Masm32. Since v2.01, it will also work with Sven B. Schreiber's SBS WALK32 Win32 Assembly Language Kit *C header files can be converted to include files for JWasm with Japheth's own dedicated h2incX. *JWasm's source code is released under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License, which allows free commercial and non-commercial use. *Fully supports Microsoft macro assembler 6 syntax, all MASM 8 instructions sets. Japheth ceased development of JWASM in January 2014 with version 2.12pre, but others on the Masm32 forum picked up where Japheth left off.

HJWasm

HJWasm, adding the prefix H in reference to Masm32 forum member Habran who started off this second WASM development continuation. Version 2.13pre was originally announced in 2016. New features include: *Instructions: :*SIMD: ::* MMX: MOVQ and added in 2.13, to supplement MOVD. ::*

AVX2 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) are extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were proposed by Intel in March 2008 and first supported by Intel with the Sandy Bridge ...

: VGATHERDPD, VGATHERQPD, VGATHERDPS, VGATHERQPS, VPGATHERDD, VPGATHERQD, VPGATHERDQ, VPGATHERQQ, VEX-encoded general purpose instructions added in 2.13. Remaining instructions added in 2.16. ::*

AVX-512 AVX-512 are 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD instructions for x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) proposed by Intel in July 2013, and implemented in Intel's Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing) and Skylake-X CPUs; t ...

: VCMPxxPD, VCMPxxPS, VCMPxxSD, VCMPxxPD, VCMPxxSS, AVX-512F set, EVEX-encoded instructions added in 2.13; VMOVQ added 2.13, to supplement MOVD. Remaining instructions added in 2.16. :*Random Number Generator:

RDRAND RDRAND (for "read random"; known as Intel Secure Key Technology, previously known as Bull Mountain) is an instruction for returning random numbers from an Intel on-chip hardware random number generator which has been seeded by an on-chip entropy s ...

, RDSEED added in 2.13. :*half-precision conversions:

F16C The F16C (previously/informally known as CVT16) instruction set is an x86 instruction set architecture extension which provides support for converting between half-precision and standard IEEE single-precision floating-point formats. History T ...

(VCVTPH2PS, VCVTPS2PH) added in 2.13. :*

Intel MPX Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions) was a set of extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. With compiler, runtime library and operating system support, Intel MPX claimed to enhance security to software by checking pointer reference ...

: Added in 2.31. *Registers: RIP, ZMM registers added in 2.13. *OO language extension added in 2.25.

HASM

HASM is a renamed version of HJWASM, starting in version 2.33. The name was used following a MASM Forum discussion thread that originally proposed a replacement name. The name HASM was proposed by forum member habran in Reply #6, and was finalized at the end of discussion thread at Reply #33. No known features are added in HASM's release cycle.

UASM

The name was actually used in version 2.33 (dated 2017-05-20) at Terraspace ltd's product page, but it was only announced in version 2.34. Changes to HJWASM includes:UASM ChangeLog
/ref> *Instruction sets: RDPID added in 2.38. :*

: VAESDEC added in 2.38 :*Data transfer: MOVBE added in 2.47. MOVABS added in 2.48. :* Intel ADX: ADCX, ADOX added in 2.38 :*

: Support of BND prefix added in 2.34. BND prefix removed from JCXZ instruction group in 2.40. :*

CLMUL instruction set Carry-less Multiplication (CLMUL) is an extension to the x86 instruction set used by microprocessors from Intel and AMD which was proposed by Intel in March 2008 and made available in the Intel Westmere processors announced in early 2010. Mathema ...

: Added in 2.46.8, including pseudo-op forms of CLMUL. :*Hashing: SHA instruction set added in 2.46.8. :* Supervisor Mode Access Prevention: CLAC added in 2.38. :* Persistent Memory Extensions: CLFLUSHOPT added in 2.38. *Addressing modes: 64bit absolute immediate (2.37) *Identified types :*Record types: fully supports registers and up to 32bit record fields in 2.41. ::*Support for 128bit: Added in 2.42, inline declaration with the type added in 2.43.1 / .2. :*Support of typedef chain on return types added in 2.46.8. :*m512 built-in types added in 2.47. *Console colour coding: Added for Windows, OSX and Linux in 2.43.1 / .2. *Function calling: C-style function calling added in 2.46.

References

External links

wasm assembler wiki
*Terraspace ltd pages

{{x86 assembly topics Open Watcom Assembler (WASM)