NASM TODO list ============== This, like the AUTHORS file, is intended for easy readability by both human and machine, thus the format. F: feature V: version you should expect it by R: responsible person or - if unassigned C: % complete D: description D: maybe on multiple lines Anything that doesn't start with /^[FVRCD]:/ should be ignored. F:-line triggers new entry. Empty V,R,C assume: V: ?, R: -, C: 0% ============= F: i18n via gettext F: Convert shallow code model to deep code model D: Tired of messing between lots of unrelated files (especially .c/.h stuff) F: Automated dependency generation for Makefile D: Current looks awful and will break if anything changes. F: Move output modules out*.c to output/ subdir R: madfire C: 10% == THESE ARE FROM old NASM's Wishlist == THEY NEED SEVERE REVISING (seems they weren't updated for a couple of years or so) F: Check misc/ide.cfg into RCS as Watcom IDE enhancement thingy V: 0.98 D: (nop@dlc.fi) F: Package the Linux Assembler HOWTO V: 0.98 F: 3DNow!, SSE and other extensions need documenting V: 0.98 D: hpa: Does it really make sense to have a whole instruction set D: reference packaged with the assembler? F: prototypes of lrotate don't match in test/*. Fix. V: 0.98 F: Build djgpp binaries for 0.98 onwards. Look into PMODE/W as a stub V: 0.98 D: it might be a lot better than CWSDPMI. It's in PMW133.ZIP. F: %undef operator that goes along with %define V: ? C: 100% F: Fix `%error' giving error messages twice. V: 0.99 D: Not especially important, as changes planned for 1.1x below will make D: the preprocessor be only called once. F: Sort out problems with OBJ V: 0.99 D: * TLINK32 doesn't seem to like SEGDEF32 et al. So for that, we D: should avoid xxx32 records wherever we can. D: * However, didn't we change _to_ using xxx32 at some stage? Try D: to remember why and when. D: * Apparently Delphi's linker has trouble with two or more D: globals being defined inside a PUBDEF32. Don't even know if it D: _can_ cope with a PUBDEF16. D: * Might need extra flags. *sigh* F: Symbol table output may possibly be useful. V: 0.99 D: Ken Martwick (kenm@efn.org) wants the following format: D: labelname type offset(hex) repetition count D: Possibly include xref addresses after repetition count? F: ELF fixes V: 0.99 D: There are various other bugs in outelf.c that make certain kinds D: of relocation not work. See zbrown.asm. Looks like we may have to do D: a major rewrite of parts of it. Compare some NASM code output with D: equivalent GAS code output. Look at the ELF spec. Generally fix things. F: ELF fixes V: 0.99 D: NASM is currently using a kludge in ELF that involves defining D: a symbol at a zero absolute offset. This isn't needed, as the D: documented solution to the problem that this solves is to use D: SHN_UNDEF. F: Debug information, in all formats it can be usefully done in. V: 0.99 D: * including line-number record support. D: * "George C. Lindauer" D: wants to have some say in how this goes through. D: * Andrew Crabtree wants to help out. F: Think about a line-continuation character. V: 0.99 F: Consider allowing declaration of two labels on the same line, V: 0.99 D: syntax 'label1[:] label2[:] ... instruction'. D: Need to investigate feasibility. F: Quoting of quotes by doubling them, in string and char constants. V: 0.99 F: Two-operand syntax for SEGMENT/SECTION macro to avoid warnings D: of ignored section parameters on reissue of __SECT__. D: Or maybe skip the warning if the given parameters are identical to D: what was actually stored. Investigate. V: 0.99 F: Apparently we are not missing a PSRAQ instruction, because it D: doesn't exist. Check that it doesn't exist as an undocumented D: instruction, or something stupid like that. V: 0.99 F: Any assembled form starting 0x80 can also start 0x82. V: 1.00 D: ndisasm should know this. New special code in instruction encodings, probably. F: Pointing an EQU at an external symbol now generates an error. V: 1.05 D: There may be a better way of handling this; we should look into it. D: Ideally, the label mechanism should be changed to cope with one D: label being declared relative to another - that may work, but could be D: a pain to implement (or is it? it may be easy enough that you just D: need to declare a new offset in the same segment...) This should be done D: before v1.0 is released. There is a comment regarding this in labels.c, D: towards the end of the file, which discusses ways of fixing this. F: nested %rep used to cause a panic. V: 1.10 D: Now a more informative error message is produced. This problem whould D: be fixed before v1.0. D: See comment in switch() statement block for PP_REP in do_directive() D: in preproc.c (line 1585, or thereabouts) F: Contribution D: zgraeme.tar contains improved hash table routines D: contributed by Graeme Defty for use in the D: label manager. F: Contribution D: zsyntax.zip contains a syntax-highlighting mode for D: NASM, for use with the Aurora text editor (??). F: Contribution D: zvim.zip contains a syntax-highlighting mode for NASM, for use with vim. F: Contribution D: zkendal1.zip and zkendal2.zip contain Kendall D: Bennett's () alternative syntax stuff, D: providing an alternative syntax mode for NASM which allows a macro D: set to be written that allows the same source files to be D: assembled with NASM and TASM. R: Kendall Bennett C: 100% F: Add the UD2 instruction. C: 100% F: Add the four instructions documented in 24368901.pdf (Intel's own document). C: 100% F: Some means of avoiding MOV memoffs,EAX which apparently the D: Pentium pairing detector thinks modifies EAX. Similar means of D: choosing instruction encodings where necessary. V: 1.10? F: The example of ..@ makes it clear that a ..@ label isn't just D: local, but doesn't make it clear that it isn't just global either. F: hpa wants an evaluator operator for ceil(log2(x)). F: Extra reloc types in ELF D: R_386_16 type 20, PC16 is 21, 8 is 22, PC8 is 23. D: Add support for the 16s at least. F: Lazy section creation or selective section output D: in COFF/win32 at least and probably other formats: don't bother to emit a section D: if it contains no data. Particularly the default auto-created D: section. We believe zero-length sections crash at least WLINK (in win32). F: Make the flags field in `struct itemplate' in insns.h a long instead of an int. C: 100%? F: Implement %ifref to check whether a single-line macro has ever been expanded since (last re) definition. Or maybe not. We'll see. F: add pointer to \k{insLEAVE} and \k{insENTER} in chapters about mixed-language programming. F: Some equivalent to TASM's GLOBAL directive D: ie something which defines a symbol as external if it doesn't end up being defined D: but defines it as public if it does end up being defined. F: Documentation doesn't explain about C++ name mangling. F: see if BITS can be made to do anything sensible in obj (eg set the default new-segment property to Use32). F: OBJ: coalesce consecutive offset and segment fixups for the same location into full-32bit-pointer fixups. D: This is apparently necessary because some twazzock in the PowerBASIC development D: team didn't design to support the OMF spec the way the rest of the D: world sees it. F: Allow % to be separated from the rest of a preproc directive, for alternative directive indentation styles. F: __DATE__, __TIME__, and text variants of __NASM_MAJOR__ and __NASM_MINOR__. F: Warn on TIMES combined with multi-line macros. V: 1.00 D: TIMES gets applied to first line only - should bring to users' attention. F: Re-work the evaluator, again, with a per-object-format fixup D: routine, so as to be able to cope with section offsets "really" D: being pure numbers; should be able to allow at _least_ the two D: common idioms D: TIMES 510-$ DB 0 ; bootsector D: MOV AX,(PROG_END-100H)/16 ; .COM TSR D: Would need to call the fixup throughout the evaluator, and the D: fixup would have to be allowed to return UNKNOWN on pass one if it D: had to. (_Always_ returning UNKNOWN on pass one, though a lovely D: clean design, breaks the first of the above examples.) V: 1.10 F: Preprocessor identifier concatenation? V: 1.10 F: Arbitrary section names in `bin'. V: 0.98.09 D: Is this necessary? Is it even desirable? D: hpa: Desirable, yes. Necessary? Probably not, but there are definitely cases where it becomes quite useful. R: madfire C: 100% F: Ability to read from a pipe. V: 1.10 D: Obviously not useful under dos, so memory problems with storing D: entire input file aren't a problem either. F: File caching under DOS/32 bit... V: 1.10? D: maybe even implement discardable buffers that get thrown away D: when we get a NULL returned from malloc(). Only really useful under D: DOS. Think about it. F: possibly spool out the pre-processed stuff to a file, to avoid having to re-process it. V: 1.10? D: Possible problems with preprocessor values not known on pass 1? Have a look... F: Or maybe we can spool out a pre-parsed version...? V: 1.10 D: Need to investigate feasibility. Does the results from the parser D: change from pass 1 to pass 2? Would it be feasible to alter it so that D: the parser returns an invariant result, and this is then processed D: afterwards to resolve label references, etc? F: Subsection support? F: A good ALIGN mechanism, similar to GAS's. V: 0.98p1 D: GAS pads out space by means of the following (32-bit) instructions: D: 8DB42600000000 lea esi,[esi+0x0] D: 8DB600000000 lea esi,[esi+0x0] D: 8D742600 lea esi,[esi+0x0] D: 8D7600 lea esi,[esi+0x0] D: 8D36 lea esi,[esi] D: 90 nop D: It uses up to two of these instructions to do up to 14-byte pads; D: when more than 14 bytes are needed, it issues a (short) jump to D: the end of the padded section and then NOPs the rest. Come up with D: a similar scheme for 16 bit mode, and also come up with a way to D: use it - internal to the assembler, so that programs using ALIGN D: don't knock over preprocess-only mode. D: Also re-work the macro form so that when given one argument in a D: code section it calls this feature. R: Panos Minos C: 100%? F: Possibly a means whereby FP constants can be specified as immediate operands to non-FP instructions. D: * Possible syntax: MOV EAX,FLOAT 1.2 to get a single-precision FP D: constant. Then maybe MOV EAX,HI_FLOAT 1.2 and MOV EAX,LO_FLOAT D: 1.2 to get the two halves of a double-precision one. Best to D: ignore extended-precision in case it bites. D: * Alternatively, maybe MOV EAX,FLOAT(4,0-4,1.2) to get bytes 0-4 D: (ie 0-3) of a 4-byte constant. Then HI_FLOAT is FLOAT(8,4-8,x) D: and LO_FLOAT is FLOAT(8,0-4,x). But this version allows two-byte D: chunks, one-byte chunks, even stranger chunks, and pieces of D: ten-byte reals to be bandied around as well. F: A UNION macro might be quite cool D: now that ABSOLUTE is sane enough to be able to handle it. F: An equivalent to gcc's ## stringify operator, plus string concatenation D: somehow implemented without undue ugliness, so as D: to be able to do `%include "/my/path/%1"' in a macro, or something D: similar... F: Actually _do_ something with the processor, privileged and D: undocumented flags in the instruction table. When this happens, D: consider allowing PMULHRW to map to either of the Cyrix or AMD D: versions? D: hpa: The -p option to ndisasm now uses this to some extent. V: 1.10 F: Maybe NEC V20/V30 instructions? ? D: hpa: What are they? Should be trivial to implement. F: Yet more object formats. D: * Possibly direct support for .EXE files? V: 1.10 F: Symbol map in binary format. Format-specific options... V: 1.10? F: REDESIGN: Think about EQU dependency, and about start-point specification in OBJ. Possibly re-think directive support. V: 1.20? F: Think about a wrapper program like gcc? V: 2.00? D: Possibly invent a _patch_ for gcc so that it can take .asm files on the command line? D: If a wrapper happens, think about adding an option to cause the D: resulting executable file to be executed immediately, thus D: allowing NASM source files to have #!... (probably silly) F: Multi-platform support? D: If so: definitely Alpha; possibly Java byte code; D: probably ARM/StrongARM; maybe Sparc; maybe Mips; maybe D: Vax. Perhaps Z80 and 6502, just for a laugh? F: Consider a 'verbose' option that prints information about the resulting object file onto stdout. F: Line numbers in the .lst file don't match the line numbers in the input. D: They probably should, rather than the current matching of the post-preprocessor line numbers.