Linux assemblers - A comparison of GAS and NASM

This article explains some of the more important syntactic and semantic differences between two of the most popular assemblers for Linux®, GNU Assembler (GAS) and Netwide Assembler (NASM), including differences in basic syntax, variables and memory access, macro handling, functions and external routines, stack handling, and techniques for easily repeating blocks of code.

Unlike other languages, assembly programming involves understanding the processor architecture of the machine that is being programmed. Assembly programs are not at all portable and are often cumbersome to maintain and understand, and can often contain a large number of lines of code. But with these limitations comes the advantage of speed and size of the runtime binary that executes on that machine.

Though much information is already available on assembly level programming on Linux, this article aims to more specifically show the differences between syntaxes in a way that will help you more easily convert from one flavor of assembly to the another. The article evolved from my own quest to improve at this conversion.

This article uses a series of program examples. Each program illustrates some feature and is followed by a discussion and comparison of the syntaxes. Although it's not possible to cover every difference that exists between NASM and GAS, I do try to cover the main points and provide a foundation for further investigation. And for those already familiar with both NASM and GAS, you might still find something useful here, such as macros.