Pasta

This is the x86-64 assembly version of my other project.

I've decided to improve the program and couldn't bother adding some of the new features in assembly (all the interesting bits are still in assembly, the rust code only adds config file and cli args parsing) so the later additions add rust to the mix; you can however still compile the pure assembly version with fasm pasta_basic.asm.

What Does It Do?

It reads data from the stdin or the clipboard and sends it to an editor (by default, Notepad.)

It will open a new editor window if none is open; if one is open, it will focus to it and replace its buffer instead.

Usage

If you didn't build the new version and went with the pure-assembly program, you can use it 2 ways:

# Read from stdin
cat readme.md | pasta
# If you don't pipe, it reads your clipboard instead.
pasta

If you've built the improved version, you can also specify a different editor in the config file. The file is named the same as the executable but with a .ini extension instead (put it next to it!)

# paste the clipboard to notepad++
pasta -e notepad++
# you can also pipe to it
cat readme.md | pasta -e notepad++
# this will always launch a new instance
pasta -n

How to Assemble (pure-assembly version)

You probably want the improved version instead; instructions are given after this.

The project makes use of flat-assembler syntax and macros, so go get it.

Make sure that the $INCLUDE environment variable contains the fasm include dir. (flat-assembler comes with an include directory for macros etc...)

Then, assemble it with:

fasm pasta_basic.asm

It compiles to exactly 6 KiB!

How to Assemble (improved version)

On top of flat-assembler, you'll need to have Rust and a version of Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Build Tools) installed.

1. Open X64 Native Tools Powershell for VS<version>.
2. Add flat-assembler's include directory to the $INCLUDE env variable; e.g $env:INCLUDE += ";D:\programs\fasm\include"
3. Run the build script in the root of this project: ./build.ps1

You can change the linker used by the build script. E.g ./build.ps1 -linker lld-link. Supported linkers are clang, lld-link and link. The default is link (comes with MSVC).

Step 1 isn't always needed, especially when the linker is lld-link or clang.

You can achieve smaller executables with lld-link.

The build script has some flags relevant for customization:

• -buildStd: Builds the rust standard library from source with panic_abort; reduces executable size significantly and allows for better optimizations. Requires nightly rust. --rustflags: A list of flags to pass to rustc. For example:
  • ./build.ps1 -rustflags -Ctarget-cpu=native
  • ./build.ps1 -rustflags "-Copt-level=s", "-Ctarget-cpu=haswell"

Config File Syntax

Take a look at pasta.ini.