PyCCA: Pure-python assembler

Luke Campagnola, 2014

ForceBru, 2018

Documentation: http://pycca.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Source: http://github.com/pycca/pycca
Installation: pip install pycca

Motivation

Python is an excellent platform for numerical computing but relies heavily on compiled modules to provide optimized functions. For distributed packages, this either increases the burden on the developer to produce compiled binaries for a variety of platforms, or increases the burden on the end user to compile the package or its binary dependencies. Consequently, many Python developers avoid optimzed code, preferring instead to advertise "pure-python" as a feature of their packages.

The objective of pycca is to provide a pure-python approach that allows assembly to be assembled to bytecode and/or relocatable libraries of sorts with no external dependencies.

Approach

This version does not execute the assembled bytecode (although it should be fairly trivial to add back). The goal is to have a real-life x86 assembler written in plain Python, and thus executable everywhere Pythons runs.

Status

Assembler:	beta
C compiler:	probably isn't happening

• Functional assembly compiler with a relatively limited set of instructions (see examples.py and pycca/asm/instructions.py). All instructions are tested to produce identical output to the GNU assembly compiler.

• Assembly examples have been tested on:

  		Linux	OSX	Windows
  IA-32	Python 2.7	X		X
  	Python 3.4	X
  Intel-64	Python 2.7	X	X
  	Python 3.4	X		X

• Unit tests pass on 64-bit and 32-bit Linux under python 2.7 and 3.4