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

Assembly and managed code

As we have already seen, static or dynamic linking is not as difficult as it may seem, as long as we are dealing with native code, but what happens when we, for example, decide to use code written in Assembly with a program written in C#, which is a managed environment and is not run by the processor itself, but rather by a sort of a virtual machine? Many are afraid of mixing native modules and managed ones. Using native modules compiled from Assembly sources with managed code may seem to be even more frightening or even impossible. However, as we have seen earlier, there is no difference between modules initially written in Assembly and those written in other languages on the binary level. When it comes to managed code like, for example C#, things are just a bit more complex than linking to native object files or using a DLL/SO. The following does not...