kolibrios/programs/develop/fasm/trunk/WHATSNEW.TXT

Visit http://flatassembler.net/ for more information.


version 1.67.35 (Mar 09, 2009)

[-] Some internal code size reductions.

[-] Discontinued "-d" switch implementation.


version 1.67.34 (Feb 22, 2009)

[-] Fixed small bug with DT directive far pointer syntax.


version 1.67.33 (Feb 20, 2009)

[+] Added ERR directive that allows to signalize error from the source.


version 1.67.32 (Feb 13, 2009)

[+] Allowed single quote character to be put inside the number value,
    to help improve long numbers readability.


version 1.67.31 (Feb 11, 2009)

[-] Fixed floating point converter to no longer generate NaN in some cases,
    and corrected denormal numbers generation.


version 1.67.30 (Feb 08, 2009)

[+] Added missing Intel SSE4 instructions.

[+] Added SSE4a (EXTRQ/INSERTQ/MOVNTSD/MOVNTSS) instructions.

[+] Added FSTENVW/FSTENVD/FSAVEW/FSAVED mnemonics.


version 1.67.29 (Nov 15, 2008)

[+] Added optional symbolic information output, and a set of tools that extract
    various kinds of information from it.

[+] Allowed RVA operator to be used in COFF object format.

[-] Corrected the FIX directive to allow names of preprocessor's directives to be
    used as prioritized symbolic constant name.


version 1.67.28 (Nov 06, 2008)

[+] Added EFI/EFIBOOT/EFIRUNTIME subsystem keywords for PE format (experimental
    feature, still needs to be tested).

[-] Fixed a bug in preprocessor which caused some problems with DISPLAY directive
    output in some cases.

[-] Fixed a bug that allowed to define a symbol named "eip" or "rip".

[-] Fixed a problem with assembling MOVQ RAX,XMM0 instruction.


version 1.67.27 (Jul 12, 2008)

[-] Fixed a bug which caused instructions from JCXZ/LOOP family to be incorrectly
    assembled when requiring 67h prefix and provided with "$" operand.

[-] Definition of macro with the same name as one of the preprocessor's directives
    is no longer allowed.

[-] Fixed REPT directive to check out validity of its parameters even when the
    count is zero.

[-] Fixed VMREAD/VMWRITE syntax in the USE64 mode.

[-] Corrected MZ header generation and handling for the case when the last page of
    executable contains the round 512 bytes.


version 1.67.26 (Jan 27, 2008)

[+] Added partial SSE4 support (a couple of instructions left to be implemented
    in the next releases)

[+] Added GETSEC instruction for the SMX functions calling.

[-] Some fixes and rearrangements in the DOS version.


version 1.67.25 (Dec 30, 2007)

[-] Fixed a couple of bugs related to undefined symbol error signaling.


version 1.67.24 (Dec 03, 2007)

[+] Added "-d" option to allow predefining symbolic constants from command line.

[-] Changed some of the error messages to be more informative.


version 1.67.23 (Sep 08, 2007)

[+] Added "static" keyword for the "public" directive in COFF format.

[-] Redirected error information into stderr.


version 1.67.22 (Aug 05, 2007)

[+] Allowed to check "@b" and "@f" symbols with "defined" operator.

[+] Allowed "as" operator to specify the output file extension when
    placed at the end of the "format" directive line.

[-] Fixed a bug with stack size declaration in PE64 format that
    caused assembler to crash.

[-] Corrected the VMREAD and VMWRITE instructions to allow registers
    in place of memory operands.

[-] Corrected a mistake that made PLT operator not work correctly with
    the CALL instruction.


version 1.67.21 (Feb 17, 2007)

[+] Allowed 32-bit relocations in PE64 output format.

[-] Fixed a bug that caused "push cr0" error to go unnoticed by assembler.


version 1.67.20 (Feb 12, 2007)

[-] Corrected the range checking of signed address displacements in 64-bit mode.


version 1.67.19 (Feb 10, 2007)

[-] Disallowed labels starting with $ character.

[-] Fixed some problems with handling 32-bit relocations in 64-bit formats.


version 1.67.18 (Dec 27, 2006)

[-] Fixed a small mistake in the recent corrections of logical expression parser.


version 1.67.17 (Dec 20, 2006)

[-] Corrected the precedence of operators of macroinstruction line maker.
    The symbol escaping now has always the higher priority than symbol conversion,
    and both have higher precedence than concatenation.

[-] Fixed problems with logical expression parser to handle correctly comparing
    values containing round brackets with the EQ or EQTYPE operator.
    The only limitation now is that when you use round brackets to enclose some
    logical expressions, they must be paired everywhere inside those expressions.


version 1.67.16 (Dec 17, 2006)

[-] Fixed a really old bug in register expression calculator.


version 1.67.15 (Nov 20, 2006)

[-] Some final (?) fixes and cleanup in the relative-offsets calculations.


version 1.67.14 (Oct 28, 2006)

[-] Another small bug fixes.


version 1.67.13 (Oct 26, 2006)

[-] Fixed a bug with handling of invalid expressions by "defined" operator.

[-] Fixed a newly-introduced bug with relocations in automatically generated RIP-relative
    addressings.


version 1.67.12 (Oct 1, 2006)

[+] Added EIP-relative addressing, and fixed some bugs with RIP-related one aswell.


version 1.67.11 (Sep 26, 2006)

[+] Added PLT operator for the ELF output format.

[-] Rearranged and fixed some of the relocation handling routines.


version 1.67.10 (Sep 23, 2006)

[+] Added SSSE3 (Supplemental SSE3) instructions.


version 1.67.9 (Sep 21, 2006)

[+] Added some Win64 headers and examples in the Windows package.

[-] Fixed another operand size checking bug with MOVQ instruction.


version 1.67.8 (Sep 17, 2006)

[-] Fixed a bug in address processing that caused disallowed combinations like
    [qword eax] to be accepted.


version 1.67.7 (Jul 31, 2006)

[-] Fixed a bug that caused over-repeated processing of macro operators when
    many embedded macros were placed in one line

[+] Added SYSRETQ mnemonic.


version 1.67.6 (Jul 21, 2006)

[+] Added (not yet documented) RDMSRQ/WRMSRQ/SYSEXITQ mnemonics for the 64-bit
    variants of respective instructions.

[+] Added information about memory allocation to the command line interfaces.
    This should make it easier to decide when to use the -m switch.


version 1.67.5 (Jul 7, 2006)

[-] Fixed encoding of MOV (E)AX,[WORD ADDR] instruction in 32-bit mode.


version 1.67.4 (Jul 5, 2006)

[+] Added R8L-R15L (Intel-style) aliases for R8B-R15B registers.

[-] Further optimizations in the parser.


version 1.67.3 (Jul 2, 2006)

[-] Improved an instruction searching algorithm a bit.


version 1.67.2 (Jul 1, 2006)

[-] Fixed a recently introduced bug with ELF relocations in case of 32-bit
    object.


version 1.67.1 (Jun 30, 2006)

[+] Added the support for the new AMD SVM technology instructions.


version 1.67.0 (Jun 28, 2006)

[-] The PE formatter now automatically detects whether relocatable labels
    should be used, depending on whether the fixups directory is placed
    somewhere into executable by programer, or not. This makes possible the
    more flexible use of the addressing symbols in case of PE executable fixed
    at some position.

[-] Added support for outputting the 32-bit address relocations in case of
    64-bit object formats. This makes some specific instructions compilable,
    but it also forces linker to put such generated code into the low 2
    gigabytes of addressing space.


version 1.66 (May 7, 2006)

[+] Added DEFINE directive to preprocessor, which defines symbolic constants,
    the same kind as EQU directive, however there's an important difference
    that DEFINE doesn't process symbolic constants in the value before
    assigning it. For example:

        a equ 1
        a equ a+a

        define b 1
        define b b+b

    defines the "a" constant with value "1+1", but the "b" is defined with
    value "b+b". This directive may be useful in some advanced
    macroinstructions.

[-] Moved part of the conditional expression processing into parser,
    for slightly better performance and lesser memory usage by assembler.
    The logical values defined with "eq", "eqtype" and "in" operators are now
    evaluated by the parser and if they are enough to determine the condition,
    the whole block is processed accordingly. Thus this block:

        if eax eq EAX | 0/0
                nop
        end if

    is parsed into just NOP instruction, since parser is able to determine
    that the condition is true, even though one of the logical values makes no
    sense - but since this is none of the "eq", "eqtype" and "in" expressions,
    the parser doesn't investigate.

[-] Also the assembler is now calculating only as many logical values as it
    needs to determine the condition. So this block:

        if defined alpha & alpha

        end if

    will not cause error when "alpha" is not defined, as it would with previous
    versions. This is because after checking that "defined alpha" is false
    condition it doesn't need to know the second logical value to determine the
    value of conjunction.

[+] Added "short" keyword for specifying jump type, the "jmp byte" form is now
    obsolete and no longer correct - use "jmp short" instead.

[-] The size operator applied to jump no longer applies to the size of relative
    displacement - now it applies to the size of target address.

[-] The RET instruction with 0 parameter is now assembled into short form,
    unless you force using the 16-bit immediate with "word" operator.

[+] Added missing extended registers for the 32-bit addressing in long mode.

[+] Added "linkremove" and "linkinfo" section flags for MS COFF output.

[+] Added support for GOT offsets in ELF object formatter, which can be useful
    when making position-independent code for shared libraries. For any label
    you can get its offset relative to GOT by preceding it with "rva" operator
    (the same keyword as for PE format is used, to avoid adding a new one,
    while this one has very similar meaning).

[-] Changed ELF executable to use "segment" directive in place of "section",
    to make the distinction between the run-time segments and linkable
    sections. If you had a "section" directive in your ELF executables and they
    no longer assemble, replace it with "segment".

[-] The PE formatter now always creates the fixups directory when told to -
    even when there are no fixups to be put there (in such case it creates the
    directory with one empty block).

[-] Some of the internal structures have been extended to provide the
    possibility of making extensive symbol dumps.

[-] Corrected FIX directive to keep the value intact before assigning it to the
    prioritized constant.

[+] The ` operator now works with any kind of symbol; when used with quoted
    string it simply does nothing. Thus the sequence of ` operators applied to
    one symbol work the same as if there was just one. In similar manner, the
    sequence of # operators now works as if it was a single one - using such a
    sequence instead of escaping, which was kept for some backward
    compatibility, is now deprecated.

[-] Corrected order of identifying assembler directives ("if db eq db" was
    incorrectly interpreted as data definition).

[-] Many other small bugs fixed.


version 1.64 (Aug 8, 2005)

[+] Output of PE executables for Win64 architecture (with "format PE64"
    setting).

[+] Added "while" and "break" directives.

[+] Added "irp" and "irps" directives.

[+] The macro arguments can be marked as required with the "*" character.

[-] Fixed checking for overflow when multiplying 64-bit values - the result
    must always fit in the range of signed 64 integer now.

[-] Segment prefixes were generated incorrectly in 16-bit mode when BP was used
    as a second addressing register - fixed.

[-] The "local" directive was not creating unique labels in some cases - fixed.

[-] The "not encodable with long immediate" error in 64-bit mode was sometimes
    wrongly signaled - fixed.

[-] Other minor fixes and corrections.


version 1.62 (Jun 14, 2005)

[+] Escaping of symbols inside macroinstructions with backslash.

[+] Ability of outputting the COFF object files for Win64 architecture
    (with "format MS64 COFF" setting).

[+] New preprocessor directives: "restruc", "rept" and "match"

[+] VMX instructions support (not documented).

[+] Extended data directives to allow use of the "dup" operator.

[+] Extended "struc" features to allow custom definitions of main structure's
    label.

[-] When building resources from the the .RES file that contained more
    than one resource of the same string name, the separate resource
    directories were created with the same names - fixed.

[-] Several bugs in the ELF64 object output has been fixed.

[-] Corrected behavior of "fix" directive to more straightforward.

[-] Fixed bug in "include" directive, which caused files included from within
    macros to be processed the wrong way.