Hack Assembler

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An assembler that translates programs written in the Hack assembly language into Hack binary code. Based on the nand2tetris course, and written in Rust.

Getting Started

You'll need to install Rust and its package manager, Cargo, on your system. Please refer to the official recommended Rust installation method for your system.

Note that you may need to use the nightly version of Rust. If you're using Rustup you can accomplish this like so:

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup default nightly

You should also have some version of git installed. You can refer to the Git documentation if you need help with that.

Clone the repository and navigate inside it:

git clone https://github.com/hashcatHitman/hack-assembler.git
cd hack-assembler

If you'd like to read the documentation, the recommended way to do so is with:

cargo doc --document-private-items --open

Which will open the documentation in your browser.

To build the assembler binary, you can do:

cargo build --profile dev

Cargo will download the dependencies and compile the binary. It will be located at ./target/debug/hack-assembler or ./target/debug/hack-assembler.exe, depending on your system.

Though relative pathing seems to work fine, for the best experience it is recommended to keep your *.asm files and the assembler in the same directory. If you are doing so and are in the directory yourself, you can compile a *.asm file to the equivalent *.hack file like so:

./hack-assembler foo.asm

Where foo can be variable, but should remain valid Unicode.

Please note that the assembler will refuse to compile bar.asm if bar.hack is already present. You must delete or relocate existing files to recompile them.