On: Avo: Better X86 Assembly Generation from Go

[nickcw]

This is a nice project :-)

Any chance of ARM/ARM64 support?

It would be super useful if you could generate the code to memory then execute it directly.

[mmcloughlin → nickcw]

Thanks :)

> Any chance of ARM/ARM64 support?

Yes multi-architecture support is definitely something I've had in mind. However I wanted to limit the scope for the initial version, so I could produce a result in a reasonable time and allow me to gauge interest.

> It would be super useful if you could generate the code to memory then execute it directly.

avo was inspired by PeachPy and asmjit, both of which can produce executable code directly. So implementing an assembler in avo is something I have had in the back of my mind. However it wasn't one of my primary goals.

The use case I initially had in mind is massively unrolled crypto routines, where there's a lot of assembly code required but not much going on conceptually. My AES-CTR mode CL (https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/136896) and meow hash port (https://github.com/mmcloughlin/meow) got me thinking in this direction.

[bepvte → nickcw]

I believe this assembly is golangs assembly, which is ISA neutral

[mmcloughlin → bepvte]

Only a small number of instructions in Go assembly are architecture neutral.

avo currently implements the x86 subset of Go assembler. It's definitely possible to add support for additional architectures, but it may be a fairly significant project.