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Comment by tfederman | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I spend a troubling amount of time as a software developer dealing with and/or avoiding solutions that are much more complicated than the problems they're trying to solve.

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tell me about it... I've been searching for a C++ library that will encode x86 instructions from syntax that looks moderately similar to assembler code. Not a disassembler, not a JIT toolkit, not a special cross-platform IR that gets compiled to real instructions. Just an instruction encoder with a moderately pretty syntax. No luck so far.

Have you seen xed [1]? It seems to fit the bill nicely from what I understand about your requirements.

[1] https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/pintool/docs/67...

yes, I don't need its decoding capability and I don't think its syntax is pretty but if I ever decide to write my own library I'll probably wrap xed in some C++ sugar.

I'm not sure I understand your requirements but might DynASM be useful? It's one component of the JIT library behind LuaJIT but many people use it for run-time code generation completely outside a JIT setting.

http://luajit.org/dynasm.html

DynASM looks cool but its preprocessing step and fancy C integration definitely place it outside the description "Just an instruction encoder with a moderately pretty syntax."

I guess it's not fair to say that XED and DynASM are "much more complicated than the problems they're trying to solve." They are much more complicated than the problem I'm trying to solve. But I am surprised that there is no minimal X86 encoder with nice C++ syntax out there.

also Xed does not seem to be open source. It ships with a bunch of headers that say "Intel Open Source License" at the top but there is a binary library instead of source files.

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