Professional Assembly Language

Chapter 14. Calling Assembly Libraries

The previous chapter demonstrated how to incorporate assembly language code within C programs by using inline assembly programming. This chapter discusses another way to incorporate assembly language code into your C or C++ programs.

Both C and C++ programs can directly call assembly language functions, pass input values to the functions, and retrieve the output value from them. This chapter discusses how to do this. First, the basics of C style assembly language functions are reviewed. Following that, you will learn how to compile C programs and assembly language functions. The next section explains how to pass values between the C program and assembly language functions, both input and output values. Then you will learn how to combine your assembly language functions into common libraries that can be used with C programs. Both static and dynamic libraries are discussed, with examples of each presented. Finally, the topic of debugging assembly language functions within C programs is discussed.

Creating Assembly Functions

Chapter 11, "Using Functions," demonstrated how to create assembly language functions that can be used in any assembly language program. This same technique can be used to provide assembly language functions for high-level C and C++ programs. This section provides a brief refresher on creating assembly language functions.

If you remember from Chapter 11, there are many ways to pass input values to an assembly function, and many ...