Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

By : Alexey Lyashko
3 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Assembly Programming

3 (1)
By: Alexey Lyashko

Overview of this book

The Assembly language is the lowest level human readable programming language on any platform. Knowing the way things are on the Assembly level will help developers design their code in a much more elegant and efficient way. It may be produced by compiling source code from a high-level programming language (such as C/C++) but can also be written from scratch. Assembly code can be converted to machine code using an assembler. The first section of the book starts with setting up the development environment on Windows and Linux, mentioning most common toolchains. The reader is led through the basic structure of CPU and memory, and is presented the most important Assembly instructions through examples for both Windows and Linux, 32 and 64 bits. Then the reader would understand how high level languages are translated into Assembly and then compiled into object code. Finally we will cover patching existing code, either legacy code without sources or a running code in same or remote process.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Intel Architecture

An introduction to calling conventions

When writing code in Assembly language, it's preferable to stick to certain calling conventions (the way parameters are passed to procedures) when invoking procedures because, first of all, this minimizes the occurrence of annoying and hard to find errors and, of course, help you link your Assembly modules to high-level languages. There are quite a few calling conventions for Intel Architecture, but we will only consider some of them, which we will use later in this book.

We already know about procedures and we have even mentioned the term "calling convention" in the previous chapter, so you may wonder why it is now that we cover the mechanism itself. The answer is quite simple--invocation of a procedure is a process that requires certain preparations, and, as such preparations would logically be the same with every procedure...