Assembly GUI programming for Mac OS X

14
votes

I’d like to know how can I do a simple assembly program for Mac OS X that shows a window on the screen and put some coloured text on that window. The code may call some Carbon or Cocoa APIs. I need some code for the nasm sintaxe.

I saw in http://snipplr.com/view/29150/assembly-code-nasm-for-mac--hello-world the next code that works fine, but it´s not graphic.

  ; Hello World in assembly for mac 
  ; 
  ; nasm -f macho hello.asm 
  ; ld -e _start -o hello hello.o 


  section .text 
  global _start ;must be declared for linker (ld) 

  _syscall: 
  int 0x80      ;system call 
  ret 

  _start:       ;tell linker entry point 

  push dword len    ;message length 
  push dword msg    ;message to write 
  push dword 1      ;file descriptor (stdout) 
  mov eax,0x4       ;system call number (sys_write) 
  call _syscall     ;call kernel 

  add esp,12        ;clean stack (3 arguments * 4) 

  push dword 0      ;exit code 
  mov eax,0x1       ;system call number (sys_exit) 
  call _syscall     ;call kernel 

  ;we do not return from sys_exit, 
  ;there's no need to clean stack 
  section .data 

  msg db "Hello, world!",0xa    ;our dear string 
  len equ $ - msg               ;length of our dear string

Thanks for any help

2
cocoamacosassemblymacos-carbon
+1 for hardcore assembly GUI programming in Mac OS X. Good luck. – user142019
Also, if you want to use Cocoa, you might want to take a look at the Objective-C Runtime Reference. – user142019
I would highly advise against trying to use objective-c directly from assembly. Just getting classes and creating instances is hard, without trying to create your own class. – ughoavgfhw

2 Answers

2
votes

This is not Carbon as requested in the comments in the previous answers, but it may help you get a step further ahead in your noble pursuit:

http://cocoawithlove.com/2010/09/minimalist-cocoa-programming.html

0
votes

You can call Carbon APIs with call like this:

call _CreateNewWindow

You can pass arguments also, but I'm unsure how to do that. Probably pushed onto the stack in reversed order just before the call:

push arg4
push arg3
push arg2
push arg1
call _CreateNewWindow

You can look in how you C code compiles into assembly, like this:

$ clang myCarbonCode.c -S -O -o myCarbonCode.s