Tools – builder and debugger
Before we proceed with more instructions, it would be best to try actually programming with assembly language. The tools we will need are a text editor, the assembly code builder, and the debugger.
Popular assemblers
All programming languages need to be built to become an executable on the system platform that the program was built for. Unless you want to enter each opcode byte in a binary file, developers have made tools to convert that source code to an executable that contains code that the machine can understand. Let's take a look at some of the most popular assembly language builders today.
MASM
Also known as Microsoft Macro Assembler, MASM has been around for more than 30 years. It is maintained by Microsoft and is part of the Visual Studio product. It was developed for compiling x86 source code to executable code.
Compiling takes two steps: compiling the source into an object file, then linking all necessary modules required by the object file into a single...