Go ships an assembler but no tooling for it: there is no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete, no linter, no static analyser, no formatter, no standalone assembler and no debugger for .s files. Developers write assembly blind, validate it by benchmark, and debug it by print statement. gasm-devkit is the missing toolkit: a single, self-contained binary, gasm, that brings proper developer tooling to Plan 9 assembly on amd64, arm64, riscv64 and loong64.

Features

Front end. A hand-written lexer and an error-tolerant parser produce a typed AST with source positions; gasm tokens and gasm parse expose them directly.
Formatter. gasm fmt canonicalises indentation, operand spacing, per-function mnemonic alignment and blank-line layout: gofmt for assembly, operating recursively on directories the way go fmt does.
Linter. gasm lint runs 17 conservative static checks, among them undefined-label, abi-argsize (declared frame vs the // func signature), register-clobber (Go ABI register liveness over the control-flow graph), stack-imbalance, abi0-register-args and unencodable-instruction.
Standalone assembler. gasm asm encodes all four architectures without the Go toolchain and writes raw images, linkable ELF objects (with DWARF5 debug sections) or the Go toolchain's own GOOBJ format, which go build consumes in place of the toolchain's output.
Dynamic verification. gasm verify JIT-loads assembled functions into executable memory: smoke calls, ABI checks (sentinel registers, red-zone canary), differential fuzzing against the go tool asm build, and byte-for-byte ground-truth comparison of the machine code.
Debugger. gasm debug is a source-level ptrace debugger with breakpoints (optionally conditional), hardware watchpoints, register and memory inspection, and headless script runs with label-level coverage.
Language server. gasm lsp serves completion, hover, document symbols, diagnostics, semantic-token highlighting, go-to-definition, find references, rename, formatting, inlay hints, code actions, signature help, document highlights and workspace symbol search over stdio.
Comparators and audits. gasm diff compares the machine code of two assembly files byte-for-byte, gasm profile shows basic-block structure, gasm audit-instructions diffs the encoder against the installed toolchain, and gasm scaffold generates a differential test skeleton for a kernel.
Complete instruction coverage. The instruction tables are generated from the Go toolchain's own assembler source, so the toolkit recognises every mnemonic the real assembler accepts; just gen refreshes them.

Architecture support

Architecture	GOARCH	File suffix	Instructions recognised
AMD64	`amd64`	`_amd64.s`	1600 + common opcodes + traditional aliases
ARM64	`arm64`	`_arm64.s`	538 + common opcodes
RISC-V	`riscv64`	`_riscv64.s`	961 + common opcodes
LoongArch	`loong64`	`_loong64.s`	799 + common opcodes

"Common opcodes" are the instructions shared by every architecture (RET, JMP, NOP, CALL, TEXT, FUNCDATA, PCDATA, ...). AMD64 additionally carries the traditional conditional-jump spellings (JZ, JNZ, JA, JC, ...) that the assembler accepts as aliases. Regenerating the tables is one command (just gen) and requires only a Go installation; the committed output has no runtime dependency on the toolchain.

Install

Prebuilt binaries for linux/amd64, linux/arm64, linux/riscv64 and linux/loong64 are on the releases page. From source (Go 1.27 or later):

go install sourcedock.dev/petrbalvin/gasm-devkit/cmd/gasm@latest

Or from a repository checkout, with the development version stamped:

just install-bin

Quick start

cat > hello_amd64.s <<'EOF'
#include "textflag.h"

// func add(a, b int) int
TEXT ·add(SB), NOSPLIT, $0-24
	MOVQ a+0(FP), AX
	ADDQ b+8(FP), AX
	MOVQ AX, ret+16(FP)
	RET
EOF

gasm lint hello_amd64.s                         # static checks
gasm asm -o hello.bin hello_amd64.s             # assemble to a raw image
gasm verify --call add --args a=2,b=3 hello_amd64.s   # JIT-call it with arguments

Usage

gasm fmt                                # reformat every .s below here, like go fmt
gasm fmt    -w kernel_amd64.s           # canonicalise one file in place
gasm lint   *.s                         # static checks
gasm asm --format elf -o k.o k.s        # assemble to a linkable ELF object
gasm asm --format goobj -p pkg/path -o k.o k.s   # Go object, consumed by go build
gasm verify --ground-truth k.s          # byte-for-byte vs go tool asm
gasm verify --fuzz k.s                  # differential fuzz vs the go tool asm build
gasm debug --func name k.s              # interactive debugger
gasm debug --func name --script cmds.txt --timeout 30s k.s   # headless run
gasm debug --func name --cover k.s      # which labels did execution reach?
gasm diff a.s b.s                       # compare machine code byte-for-byte
gasm diff --map wideCopyAVX2=wideCopyAVX512 avx2.s avx512.s
gasm profile k.s                        # show basic-block structure
gasm audit-instructions                 # encoder vs go tool asm name diff
gasm scaffold differential k.s          # generate a differential test skeleton

Run gasm --help for the command overview and gasm <command> -h for a command's flags. docs/CLI.md is the full reference.

Editor integration

gasm lsp speaks the Language Server Protocol over standard input/output, so any LSP-capable editor can use it: point your editor's LSP client at the binary and associate it with .s files. Syntax highlighting is delivered as LSP semantic tokens, so no editor-specific grammar is required. The server infers the target architecture from the file-name suffix (_amd64.s / _arm64.s / _riscv64.s / _loong64.s).

Development

just install      # download module dependencies
just build        # go vet + gofmt check, zero errors and zero warnings
just test         # full suite, race detector, 80 % coverage gate
just fmt          # gofmt the tree
just gen          # regenerate the instruction tables from the Go toolchain

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow and docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for setup details and every recipe.

Documentation

docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: components and data flow
docs/CLI.md: full command reference
docs/DEVELOPMENT.md: development setup and recipes
docs/DECISIONS.md: deferred design decisions
CHANGELOG.md: release history

Licence

BSD-3-Clause — see LICENSE.