samdoiron/hack

An assembler for the HACK Assembly language

Hack Assembly Compiler

Requirements

Compilation requires the Boost v1.5.7 libraries to be installed. As 1.5.7 is the latest version, these can be obtained by using a package manager on UNIX environments.

On OSX (using homebrew): brew install boost

On Linux (using apt): sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

Building

The project comes with a working CMake file. To compile on a UNIX environment, use you can simply use make from the main directory.

If that fails, or you need to compile on a different platform, then you can use the provided CMakeLists.txt file to generate build files.

Performance

Local testing shows that files of the maximum possible size for the HACK computer assemble correctly in ~0.1s

The largest optimization that was done was to cache instructions and their comipled form internally. In practise, this resulted in a ~33% speedup (0.15s -> 0.1s) in the worst case.

Other techniques, such as pre-calculating the result for every possible HACK assembly instruction were found to be less effective.