I've been learning a little assembly with some other Hacker Schoolers. It's fun, but I spent nearly an hour yesterday trying to find a modern online guide for running x86-64 assembly on OS X, and couldn't really find anything that didn't involve complicated uses of gcc. Frankly, without the ever-wise advice of davidad, I probably wouldn't have figured it out, so here's a quick guide to what I did for future reference.
Update nasm
nasm is the command you'll use to assemble assembly code. The default version on my computer was old and didn't have the proper formats, so just I used homebrew to update it by installing a newer version.
$ brew install nasm
After I closed and reopened my terminal, I got the new version of nasm, which had the critical macho64 format.
$ nasm -v
NASM version 2.11 compiled on Mar 4 2014
$ nasm -hf
...
macho32 NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/Darwin/MacOS X (i386) object files
macho64 NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/Darwin/MacOS X (x86_64) object files
dbg Trace of all info passed to output stage
...
An Example Assembly File
Stick this example assembly file in a hello_world.asm file in a new directory:
%define SYSCALL_WRITE 0x2000004
%define SYSCALL_EXIT 0x2000001
global start
start:
mov rdi, 1
mov rsi, str
mov rdx, strlen
mov rax, SYSCALL_WRITE
syscall
mov rax, SYSCALL_EXIT
mov rdi, 0
syscall
section .data
str:
db `Hello, assembly!\n` ; to use escape sequences, use backticks
strlen equ $ - str
It should print hello, world, and then exit.
Using nasm and ld
To assemble your code, run:
# Generate object file from assembly:
nasm -f macho64 -o hello_world.o hello_world.asm
# Link object file:
ld hello_world.o -o hello_world
# Run executable:
./hello_world
If all goes well, you should see Hello, assembly! appear in your terminal. Good work!