EASM is a small assembly-like programming language and simple virtual machine written in C.

I originally made this project to learn more about how assemblers, instructions and virtual machines work.

Discontinued for now.

I am currently focusing on other projects and learning more about C, Assembly, computer architecture and systems programming. I may come back to EASM in the future.

EASM programs are assembled into a binary file. The VM then loads that file and executes the instructions.

EASM source
    ↓
 assembler
    ↓
program.bin
    ↓
    VM
    ↓
 execution

SET R0 10
SET R1 20
ADD R0 R1
PRINT R0

This sets two registers, adds them together and prints the result.

The current instruction set includes:

• SET
• ADD
• SUBTRACT
• MULTIPLICATE
• DIVIDE
• INCREMENT
• DECREMENT
• NEGATE
• SWAP
• PRINT
• LABEL
• JUMP
• BREAK

There are currently four registers and support for integer and floating-point values.

The virtual machine is written in C and executes the instructions generated by the assembler.

It currently handles:

• registers
• arithmetic
• jumps
• labels
• integer/floating-point values
• loading programs from program.bin

You need a C compiler such as GCC or Clang.

gcc asm.c -o asm
gcc vm.c -o vm

Then assemble a program and run it with the VM.

This was one of my earlier projects for learning low-level programming.

I wanted to understand what happens between something that looks like assembly code and something that can actually be executed.

The project is pretty simple and has a lot of things that could be improved, but it was a useful starting point for learning about instruction sets, binary data and virtual machines.

If I come back to the project, some things I would like to work on are:

• better error handling
• more instructions
• stack support
• functions
• conditional jumps
• memory
• a debugger
• a better binary format

EASM is mainly a learning project and is not intended to replace a real assembler or compiler.