Hello.
I am writing brainfuck compiler in high level language. It converts brainfuck source into fasm source file. But I have some problems in fasm part.
1) (problem due to lack of experience) How should I allocate memory (30000 cells/bytes)? It seems that I must allocate it using libc or should I use some kind of syscall? I have read that linux does not have memory allocation mechanism built in - that is why I am confused.
2) How can I read single char from console/terminal? Syscall #3 is not very useful, it does not stop after reading a char.

1. Linux kernel doesn't have heap manager (common memory allocation mechanism for applications) built in. Instead, it expects every application to link to libc. Best way is to link your asm source with libc and use libc for I/O.

2. Again, use libc if you can. You will save yourself many problems.

So... I have to use malloc() and free() to manage memory. But another question - can I use getchar() or fgetc(FILE*) is more suitable for asm? It is written, that in c stdin is already initialized (when program starts), so I guess stdin is not initialized in asm and I can't use getchar() directly. Or can I?

Your program definitively should invoke libc startup code to initialize stdin. However I have to admit I don't know how dynamic linking works in Linux (I assume you are linking to glibc dynamically).

Ok, thanks vid.
I did it just like libcdemo example does it.(i guess it is not really dinamic linking)
Now i have memory allocated and freed, and getchar() works without any manual initialization. But the problem remains - this function does not read single char AND then stop reading.

If you *really* only want to read char from stdin, you could use handle I/O instead of stream I/O (read() from handle 1, instead of fgetc() from FILE* stdin). But I would suggest to rather look into proper linux libc usage than workarounding problems.

You could link your program with crtbegin.o and crtend.o. These can be found in /usr/lib/gcc/?/?/.

Dumb answer, but hey, what'd you expect from me?



Or preferably even in .bss or wherever.