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How to write an assembly ‘hello world’ on macOS

I started with this gist, creating this file:

global start
section .text
start:
  mov rax, 0x2000004 ; write
  mov rdi, 1 ; stdout
  mov rsi, msg
  mov rdx, msg.len
  syscall
  mov rax, 0x2000001 ; exit
  mov rdi, 0
  syscall
section .data
msg:    db      "Hello, world!", 10
.len:   equ     $ - msg

This is “assembly”, but this term is vague. Getting specific, this file:

To compile it, we need tools which understand all of these. One of these is nasm, the “Netwide Assembler”. It seems to be the most popular assembler. I ran the program with:

$ brew install nasm
$ nasm -version
NASM version 2.12.02 compiled on Sep 14 2016
$ nasm -f macho64 hello.s
$ ld -macosx_version_min 10.7.0 -lSystem -o hello hello.o
$ ./hello
Hello, world!

There are lots of unknown bits in here. I’ll cover them in future posts ...

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After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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