This article is about an assembler. For the American museum, see National Air and Space Museum

NASM, the Netwide Assembler, is a recently written x86 assembler. It can be used to write both 16-bit and 32-bit (IA-32) programs.

32-bit programs can be written for NASM in such a way that they are portable between any 32-bit x86 OSes, if the right libraries are used.

NASM will output various binary formats on any machine, ranging from COFF and a.out to ELF and the native Minix binary format (NASM even defines its own binary format, RDOFF, which is currently used only by the RadiOS operating system project). This allows one to cross-assemble programs for one x86 operating system on a different, presumably more capable, one. In addition, NASM will create flat binary files, usable in writing boot loaders, ROM images, and various facets of OS development. NASM will even run on non-x86 platforms, such as the Sparc and the PowerPC, even though it will not output programs usable by those machines.

NASM uses the Intel format for x86 assembly language, whereas the GNU assembler (GAS) uses the AT&T format.

NASM is currently developed at SourceForge.

External links

• NASM (SourceForge)
• RadiOS (SourceForge)