Optimizer for Z80 assembly

[Optimizer for Z80 assembly]

Thanks jltursan!!! Very happy to know MDL is useful 

 

 

[Optimizer for Z80 assembly]

Thanks artrag for mentioning my optimizer here!! And apologies for jumping (very) late to the discussion

 

I have been working on lots of improvements to the optimizer for the past few months (latest version here: https://github.com/santiontanon/mdlz80optimizer/releases/tag/v1.7 ), and it should be much more robust now. As for support for tniasm (and other assemblers), I'd love to improve support for tniasm! What I have done is to look for open source projects using the different assemblers, and use them as test cases. So, for tniasm, I have these two: Zombie Near and z80rogue. Given that implementing all the directives of a given assembler is a mountain to climb (it's basically recreating the original assembler, but inside of MDL haha), what I do is to support only those directives that seem to be used in practice. So, pointers to source code using tniasm would be awesome, so I can add them to my test suite, and improve tniasm support

 

As for SDCC, I've been improving support for the sdasz80 assembler (used by SDCC), so, it should be much better now. In order to make sure mdl plays nice with SDCC, this is the way I recommend calling it: 

 

java -jar mdl.jar my-source-file.asm -dialect sdcc -ro-no-inliner -ro -po -asm-dialect my-optimized-source-file.asm

 

That will trigger the "reorganizer optimizer" (but deactivating the "inliner", which SDCC does not like), then the "pattern-based optimizer", and finally it will save the resulting optimized file mimicking the syntax of the selected dialect (in this case sdcc).

 

MDL is still evolving, so, there's probably lots of rough edges still. But any feedback/bug-report is welcome!

 

For anyone curious I recorded a video explaining how to use MDL (this was using version 1.4, but most things still apply to version 1.7):