What is the fastest Amiga assembler

[kamelito]

I tested ArgASM 1.09e, AsmPro 1.20b, Basm 2.0, Devpac 3.18 and Vasm.

The fastest I found is probably Basm then ArgASM, then AsmPro then Devpac and Vasm.
ProASM crashed so I can't test.

is there other assemblers that can beat Basm ?

[meynaf]

I don't know if it can beat Basm, but PhxAss is usually quite fast.

[kamelito]

Thanks I’ll try.

[a/b]

Years ago when I started fixing asm-pro, I tested it against devpac, barfly, and vasm (maybe even phxasm, I think I gave up because of way too much unsupported stuff and vasm being a successor).
Test subject was asm-pro source code, about 1.1mb at the time, not counting the includes. Asm-pro itself was fastest, barfly was ~2x slower, devpac much slower, and vasm veeeery much slower. Each of these has its own strengths/weaknesses, and is designed accordingly, so that's that.
And that was without 1000+ micro optimizations I had made afterwards (btw, it could be ~25% faster by changing the hashing function but that would break some other functionality so it was never included).
I did take a look at proasm some time later, but there were too many errors (even after "cleaning up" the source for barfly) so I gave up. With only pass1 + full errorlog it was about as fast as barly.

Never seen arg-asm, now I have to check it out ;P.

[SkulleateR]

Back in the days of A500 and Kick/WB 1.3 we always used the SEKA Assembler ... really don´t know how this plays today

[Don_Adan]

From my memory Phxass was the fastest Amiga assembler.
Of course it can be dependent to used optimization too.
I used opt 0 (no optimization) or something similar, I dont remember after many years.
But assembling speed is/was for me less important.

[Karlos]

This seems to be an odd thing to wonder about today. Are any of them not fast enough?

[kamelito]

@a/b thanks, did your work included in AsmPro 1.20b?
@karlos, i guess you are a bit off topics

[alexh]

The fastest assembler is surely a cross assembler on your PC/Mac on a shared drive

[a/b]

Originally Posted by kamelito

@a/b thanks, did your work included in AsmPro 1.20b?

Yeah, 1.19 and onward is my contributions (with thanks to all who reported the bugs).

[kamelito]

@alexh. Yeah obviously, that’s why I put native tools to avoid the confusion, I guess that citing Vasm lead you in a wrong direction.

[NorthWay]

I thought ArgAsm was the fastest flat-out one out there - but too buggy for real use (I have an original copy).
BAsm can get a speed-bump from file caching, so if you assemble multiple times (typical test/edit/re-assemble bugfixing) you might see a boost from that.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by kamelito

@a/b thanks, did your work included in AsmPro 1.20b?
@karlos, i guess you are a bit off topics

I'm just confused as to what people are building, or perhaps what they are building it on, where the speed of the assembler is an important factor?

I may have completely missed the point though.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I may have completely missed the point though.

I believe it is totally irrelevant and a "just fun benchmark" as if you were really concerned about assembler speed you wouldn't assemble natively.

[TCD]

Maybe this thread needs more numbers? (Oh god, what am I doing )

[meynaf]

Under winuae JIT i can assemble a 4MB source in less than 1 second with Phxass

[haps]

Originally Posted by TCD

Maybe this thread needs more numbers? (Oh god, what am I doing )

Don't forget the cowbells.

[kamelito]

There’s nothing more to understand than what I wrote.

[phx]

Originally Posted by a/b

Each of these has its own strengths/weaknesses, and is designed accordingly, so that's that.

This.

I remember from the beginning of the 90s that Basm was very fast, probably in a similar category as PhxAss. But Basm is a single-pass assembler, while PhxAss does two passes.

vasm is meant for cross-assembly. I try my best to improve performance, but this is not its design goal.

When using assemblers with integrated development environment you could possibly cheat, by already doing some encoding when entering the source. I remembler the Atari "TurboAss" doing that.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

what they are building it on

An Amiga?