5. Assembling Legacy TI-Syntax Arm Assembly Language Source

In addition to the tiarmclang compiler’s integrated assembler used to assemble GNU-syntax Arm assembly language source files, the tiarmclang compiler toolchain also includes a stand-alone legacy TI-syntax Arm assembler, tiarmasm, that can be used to assemble legacy TI-syntax Arm assembly source files.

The use of the legacy TI-syntax Arm assembler can be useful when you are migrating a project built with the armcl compiler to use the tiarmclang compiler, but there are legacy TI-syntax Arm assembly source files that will not require maintenance. For such files, you may choose to assemble the source file with the legacy TI-syntax Arm assembler rather than convert the source file into GNU-syntax Arm assembly language. Please see the Migrating Assembly Language Source Code for more information.

You can invoke the legacy TI-syntax Arm assembler to create an object file from a legacy TI-syntax Arm assembly source file like so:

%> tiarmasm <options> file.asm

With the help of the tiarmclang’s -x option, the legacy TI-syntax Arm assembler can also be invoked from the tiarmclang compiler command-line as follows:

%> tiarmclang <options> -x ti-asm file1.asm -x none file2.c

The “-x ti-asm” option tells the compiler to interpret any source files that follow it as legacy TI-syntax Arm assembly files, for which the compiler will invoke tiarmasm from inside the compiler. If other file types are included on the command-line, then the “-x none” option can be used to instruct the compiler to interpret subsequent files based on their extension. IN the above example, “file1.asm” will be interpreted as a legacy TI-syntax Arm assembly file and “file2.c” will be interpreted as a C file. Please see Invoking the TI-Syntax ARM Assembler from tiarmclang for more information.