Torque is an architecture-independent assembler and language. It provides the leverage needed to assemble programs for any processor architecture, with instruction encodings being defined using the language itself.
For a quick overview of the language, see the language overview section of the manual.
Background
Existing assemblers for embedded processors suffer from a number of issues. Assemblers tend to be poorly documented, offer languages that are clunky or verbose, be bloated or difficult to operate, and be available for only one operating system. Development of C compilers is often a higher priority than the development of good assemblers.
Instead of learning a new assembler for every embedded processor, it would be preferrable to be able to use a single general-purpose assembler for every project. Torque was created to fill this niche.
Design
Torque was designed around the idea that any assembly language can be emulated using just binary literals, labels, integers, and sufficiently powerful macros. With Torque, the instruction encoding for a target processor is defined as a set of macros using the language itself, using word templates to specify how values are packed into ranges of bits. A program can be written for any processor using only Torque and the datasheet for that processor.
Torque uses the same symbol resolution mechanism as Bedrock, which means that shared code can be kept as libraries that can be pulled into any program during assembly, keeping programs small and modular.
Installation
Source code for the torque assembler can be downloaded from code.benbridle.com/torque-asm.
The latest release is available at tq-2.0.2 as a pre-compiled Linux executable.
Build from source
To build the Torque assembler from source, first install the Rust compiler from www.rust-lang.org/tools/install, then install the nightly toolchain with rustup toolchain install nightly, and then run cargo +nightly build --release inside the torque-asm source code directory.
The compiled binary will be created at ./target/release/tq.
Usage
The following command will assemble the Torque source file source and save the assembled output to the file destination in the chosen format.
tq [source] [destination] --format=<format>
Documentation
- Manual v2.0.0
The full user manual for version 2.0.0 of the language and assembler.