how hello world for arm64 assembly really works (apple silicon)

[@raveioo2521]

I was having an error while linking the hello.o file with libraries via ld command, stating System library not found, you can rectify that by using, -lto_library (in place of -l) System (rest all the same) it was really a wonderful video! can't thank you enough Chris!

Thank you for this, I am hugely in debt for people like you who are just dedicating their personal and teaching all of us for free. Incredible!

[@chrishayuk]

It’s fun, I enjoy do the vids very much, just glad they are useful to others

@@chrishayuk You are a god send. Much appreciation from Prague!

[@decky1990]

This video is genuinely brilliant - really hoping you have more, but the syscall breakdown was extremely insightful.

[@chrisrockscode1202]

It is amazing that I have tried doing a simple hello world on apple silicon and tried about a dozen different so called correct tutorials that never worked… THIS ACTUALLY WORKED!!! This just revived my desire to keep going with assembly studies!

[@chrishayuk]

Glad it was useful. This was one of my fave set of vids to do

[@DeniseNepraunig]

Thank you very much Chris for putting together this tutorial. It's a rather niche topic so it's not so easy to find resources for that. This is the first video I've watched from you and this is really excellent editing and showing the terminal on top of your video is such a cool idea! Again, thanks man, I really appreciate that video!

[@chrishayuk]

Heyyy thank you, I glad you like and glad it was useful

[@MattCavanaugh-j2r]

Thanks. Stuggled compiling other hello world tutorials, and this fixed it because you provided specific apple silicon instructions. Big thanks, cheers!

[@davidpetersonharvey]

Best video on assembly for Arm64 I've seen so far.

[@chrishayuk]

Yaaaay, thank you

[@polymathcode]

Thanks for this! Also for anyone running into the following error when using ld/linker manually: "ld: warning: ignoring file hello.o, building for macOS-arm64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64" 1. remove the hello.o file 2. specify the architecture when running clang ie. clang hello.c -c -o hello.o -arch arm64 3. Then run the command as specified eg. ld hello.o -o hello -lSystem -syslibroot `xcrun -sdk macosx --show-sdk-path` -e _main -arch arm64

[@polymathcode]

Along the same lines if you get errors that mention unknown tokens or invalid instruction mnemonic eg. invalid instruction mnemonic "svc" add the arch flag and specify arm64 ie. as hello.s -o hello.o -arch arm64

[@dazealex]

Really cool stuff! I used to write ASM in my DOS days... Nice to see people talking about base level things! Knowing this kind of stuff can come in really handy as you pointed out. Keep up the good work!

[@timicesq5059]

Surprisingly, MacOS's API on aarch64 is very similar to MS-DOS' 16-bit API and very dissimilar to the Windows' 32-bit and 64-bit API. You should feel at home watching this now ;-)

[@nathanblackburn5055]

This is a brilliant video, I have been interested in assembly for ages but couldnt find anything on sillicon. Thank you for sharing this! subscribed

[@scotto-robotto]

This was exactly what I was looking for. Concise and straight to the point!

[@cmatrix6720]

this video is so underrated. keep up the good job bro. you are amazing 😍

[@chrishayuk]

thank you, i had a lot of fun creating this vid, glad you liked

[@GradStudentTutorials]

This is by far the best tutorial that I've found. Instant like/sub.

[@chrishayuk]

Awesome, thank you!

[@bryanWeston-y4f]

Very interesting..... I am a Java programmer, a good two levels above assembly!. However, sometimes I have a need to access low level stuff....for example, it would be nice to be able to access CPU vector instructions, passing in addresses of arrays in java , and getting back the fully calculated result. Java can do it, there is autovectorisation...but, it doesn't always work as expected, when the calculations get complex, it gives up. The next piece of the puzzle, I need to understand how to get Java talking to MacOS aarch64 Libraries with (JNI) .... and even how to make a library from assembly. Thats the next challenge!

[@Chevifier]

Im starting to see why people find assembly hard. Its super strict down to what values get passed to each physical registry. You just HAVE to know what to do for each.😂 now i know this its now easier to understand.

[@chrishayuk]

yeah, definitely not an easy thing to code

[@azaleacolburn]

You’ve learned my subscription, nice explanation!

[@lorisslow5582]

I just stumbled across this, fantastic explanations and walkthrough. Please do more arm64 assembly for apple silicon.

[@maxcnunes]

Thank you so much! It was a great and simple introduction to assembly.

[@Winter_Sand]

With the final running of the code, running the assembly hello world, the code still works if I don't link the SDK and libraries during the "ld" function (I can just do "ld hello.o -o hello -e _start"), and doing ./hello still works. Does that mean that the rest of the function linking the libraries and defining the main function is unnecessary? Genuine question, just trying to reduce the amount of complex code I'm not entirely sure I understand

[@sushiConPorotos]

Cool. I used to code in x86 assembly decades ago. Now I'm dipping my toe into ARM.

[@chrishayuk]

it's a lot fun, enjoy

[@PaulBerger-y8i]

Thanks, nice tutorial to get started in ARM assembler... a long way from the 6502 !!!

[@dustingarner4620]

This was so helpful, thank you!

[@chrishayuk]

I'm so glad!

[@MidnightAmethyst]

Google could have shown me this before I spent 5-6 hours getting something to work from a 3 year old windows tutorial

[@chrishayuk]

Yeah, there isn’t a lot of info on this, glad it was useful

[@MichaelNortonFG2SW]

How do I configure visual studio for the "code ." to work from the terminal?

[@clout.2941]

If anyone is following along with a M2 and gets the error "ld: library not found for -l" when linking, remove the space between "-l" and "System". Took me forever to find it. Hope it works.

[@miamora3221]

Wait, how is the code auto completing there? What is the extension?

[@locpham6611]

Nice video with explanation Chris. Btw, can i ask what is the name your lens ? . You look really cool with this glass man 😎😎😎

[@chrishayuk]

Thank you, the glasses are by swanwick it’s a special blue light filtering lens

[@oleholgerson3416]

when I run the final example it prints the text but then segfaults. The code is identical to the example. What could that be?

[@soaringfranz]

How does the execution flow return to _main, so that it can execute b _terminate after printing?

[@sjzara]

Outstanding.

[@chrishayuk]

thank you, glad it was useful

[@omran.alshehabi]

That was AMAZONG !! THX

[@chrishayuk]

Awesome, glad you liked it

[@gachikuku]

How would you go about writing assembly code for x86_64 on apple silicon then compiling it, linking it and executing it?!

[@michaelwu99]

That your normal lighting setup?

[@chrishayuk]

Yes, except I moved the 2 background lights out of shot for later videos

[@michaelwu99]

@@chrishayuk you got that trance edm ethereal lighting respect

[@JoseColonTV]

Awesome video, thank you so much. On a side note and I hope I'm not intruding here, I was wondering if those are Corning glasses you're wearing. I was once prescribed a pair of Corning glasses when I was a kid and they really helped me read the screen a lot better. But now I can't. find a lab that makes them anywhere. Anyway thanks again!

[@munkhbayarbyambadelger954]

when i run my code, it does not print "hello world". What could be the cause?

[@someone_somewherx]

We would need to see the code to be able help with this

[@sent4dc]

What happens if a function has more than 8 input parameters? How'd you pass them?

[@timicesq5059]

They go to the stack. But you should design your APIs to not require that many parameters. If you really need more parameters then create a structure and pass its address as one parameter.

[@xrafter]

AFAIK, "gcc" in mac is actually an alias to clang. Edit: oh you actually installed gcc. But I don't know if it gonna work as gcc or clang.

[@ДядькаГлюк]

How to output number?

[@xrafter]

You need to make it a string. In C you have itoa to convert an int to a string. You can inplement itoa in Assembly if you want it's not hard once you get the basics. You can also output a single digit by adding 0x30 to the number no need to implement itoa for that. In assembly that is: x1 = 1. Add x1, x1, 0x30. This will make the x1 = 0x31 which is the character "1" in ASCII. Now you you could use write with size 1 to output "1".

[@spazkong]

I can keep up with what you're saying although I'm technically nowhere near your ability. I'm mostly wondering where your speaking accent originates. You sound very English, Scottish and perhaps Canadian, sometimes American. I'm picking up Manchester, Glasgow and sometimes East Midlands for UK. I don't know much about American or Canadian accents. Anyway, I'm genuinely interested in modern assembly languages after almost 35 years away. I last did it on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

[@chrishayuk]

hahaha, very nice, my accent is very confused. i am indeed scottish, and i live in england

[@spazkong]

@@chrishayuk Yeah, ha ha. Don't worry, you sound cool. I watched a recent interview with Sandy White, the 3D Ant Attack guy, could listen all day long. I love our broad range of natural accents and much easier to learn from :)

[@sillygaby_]

incredibly silly instant sub

[@andrewdunbar828]

X0 to X7 would be the first eight registers rather than the first seven registers, unless there's one we can't use.

[@chrishayuk]

hahahaha, yeah. i misspoke

[@henkoegema6390]

👍

[@guilherme5094]

👍!

[@chrishayuk]

thank you :)

[@MichaelNortonFG2SW]

I ran into some problems with linking on my M2 Studio with Sonoma 14.4.1. Reading through the threads, this worked for me. ld hello.o -o hello -lSystem -syslibroot `xcrun -sdk macosx --show-sdk-path` -e _main -arch arm64

[@bilalahsan678]

ld: library not found for -lSystem,

[@willcasp]

I get the same error running Mac OS Ventura. Did you find a solution for this problem?

[@willcasp]

I found a solution. In the code, change .global _main to .global _start then lower down change _main: to _start: When you invoke the linker, change -e _main to -e _start. (no periods after start, youtube correction keeps putting that in).. looks like the linker has a problem with _main in newer versions of MacOS

[@nathanblackburn5055]

That's interesting because I was getting the same error but for me it was because I was using single quote's '' and not backticks ``@@willcasp

[@sergeevdavid38]

same error on Ventura, tried everything, nothing changed

[@乌云-o3e]

@@sergeevdavid38 .global _main .align 2 _main: b _printf b _terminate _printf: mov X0, #1 adr X1, helloworld mov X2, #12 mov X16, #4 svc 0 _reboot: mov X0, #1 mov X16, #55 svc 0 _terminate: mov X0, #0 mov X16, #1 svc 0 helloworld: .ascii "hello world " compilation process: as hello.asm -o hello.o ld hello.o -o hello -demangle -dynamic -macosx_version_min 13.0 -L/usr/local/lib -syslibroot /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk -lSystem