One of the more painful things I had to debug with machine code. Tricks
I used can be seen in ex10.subx:
- printing argv[1] in various places
- printing a single 'X' in various places to count how many times we get
to different instructions
- exiting with the current value of EAX in various places
I repeatedly went down the wrong trail in several ways:
- forgetting that the problem lay in native runs, and accidentally switching
to subx runs during debugging.
- forgetting to pass commandline args, because ex10 doesn't check its argv
- writing the wrong comment for an instruction, and then miscalculating
the set of registers that need to be saved.
- forgetting that syscalls clobber EAX.
Debugging native runs is hard, because you have to write non-trivial code
to instrument the binary, and instrumentation can itself be buggy.
When we finally tracked it down, I recognized the problem immediately.
I'd meant to confirm the behavior of opcode 8a against bare metal, and
then forgot.
In any case, opcode 8a was inconsistent with 88. Sloppy.
New example program: ascii null-terminated string comparison
I'd hoped this would be a stepping stone to supporting general ascii comparison,
but we're planning to use size-prefixed rather than null-terminated arrays
everywhere. The only exception is commandline arguments, which will remain
null-terminated to interoperate with Linux.
So I'm going to need separate functions for "compare with argv" and for
general string comparison.
Kartik Agaram