I’ve been learning compiler theory and assembly and have managed to create a compiler that generates x86 assembly code.
How can I take this assembly code and turn it into a .exe? Is there some magical API or tool I have to interact with? Or is it simpler than I think?
I’m not really sure what’s in a .exe, or how much abstraction lies between assembly code and the .exe itself.
My ‘compiler’ was written in Java, but I’d like to know how to do this in C++ as well.
Note that if I take the generated assembly, it compiles to a .exe just fine for example with vc++.
Edit: To be more precise, I already know how to compile assembly code using a compiler. What I’m wanting is to have my program to basically output a .exe.
It looks like you need to spawn an assembler process and a linker process. On UNIX, it’s as simple as invoking the
fork()function, which would create a new process, and theexec()function, specifying the assembler and the linker executable names as the function’s parameter, with suitable arguments to those executables, which would be the names of your generated assembly and object files. That’s all you’d need to do on a UNIX system.