Getting prepared to write assembly language can be a bit confusing. There are a number of tools that can compile and link assembly. It may not be obvious right away which tool works on your particular operating system, supports compiling to a machine binary that is compatible with your processor, and is compatible with a debugger.
I tried a number of options around compiling, linking and debugging before finding a solution that worked well
- [gcc](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Invoking-GCC.html)
- [g++](https://linux.die.net/man/1/g++)
- [nasm](https://www.nasm.us/doc/)
- [yasm](http://yasm.tortall.net/releases/Release1.3.0.html)
- [ld](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ld+linker+command+line&oq=ld+linker+command+line+&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l5.3435j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
- [gdb](https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/)
- [clang](https://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html)
I started with clang but had trouble getting the the linked executable to run.
Next I tried a combination of nasm to compile and ld for linking. For example,
nasm -f macho64 -o hello_world.o hello_world.asm
ld hello_world.o -o hw
./hwThis works well on a Mac until you need to debug. gdb is not able to step through a file linked from a macho64 object file. This blog post details a similar ordeal [here](https://lord.io/blog/2014/gdb-on-osx/). nasm does not support the macho debug format yet.
The blog linked above suggested using a virtual machine to run Linux whose supported assembly language formats have support for debugging via nasm. However, I did not want to run a heavy VM when a lighter docker container could do the job.
I am going to use this example image for guidance [here](https://github.com/kellyi/nasm-gcc-container).
My goal is to use a live docker container to step through the assembly code. Update on how I go with that soon.