Design and Implementation of An Assembler and Linker for Teaching and Experiments

This paper presents the design and implementation of an assembler and linker for teaching experiments in computer architecture and program design. The implemented assembler and linker are based on the x86 Linux platform using the Rust language and have been tested and verified for their functionality. The assembler uses AT&T syntax and generates ELF format target files, while the linker links multiple ELF format target files into an executable file. The verification of the correctness of instruction generation, target file, and executable file was presented in this paper. These tools can be used in undergraduate courses on computer organization and assembly programming, helping students learn the fundamentals of computer architecture and programming. Finally, the source code for these tools was shared in GitHub website.