portalgun-io / battlestar

:dizzy: A different take on assembly, with the goal of creating tiny executables

Battlestar

What is Battlestar?

• A work in progress.
• Created for fun and for the educational process.
• A programming language specifically for 64-bit and 32-bit x86 and Linux.
• Subset of assembly with an alternative syntax and with support for inline C.
• The indended purpose is for writing 4k and 64k demoscene demos.

Quick start

Build and install Battlestar, build the samples and run the "life" sample:

• make; sudo make devinstall; make samples; cd life; ./life.sh

This requires DosBox, Go, Yasm and GCC.

gcc-go is not supported yet.

Features and limitations

• The resulting executables are tiny!
• "hello world" is only 174 bytes for 32-bit Linux (when using sstrip from elfkickers). (238 bytes for 64-bit Linux, 31 bytes for 16-bit DOS)
• It's possible to write an operating system / kernel with only one source file.
• Full support for inline C (by utilizing gcc).
• C and Battlestar code can exist in the same source file and calls can be made both ways.
• Battlestar programs compiles almost instantly.
• Programs can be run like scripts by including this line at the top: #!/usr/bin/bts
• Interrupts can be called with the same syntax for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 on Linux.
• Also supports 16-bit x86 with DosBox.
• The intermediate assembly is fully commented.
• No register allocator, just an alternative assembly syntax.

In progress

• macOS support
• Reimplementing 16-bit demoscene demos without using any inline assembly
• See TODO

Installation

Make sure Go, Yasm and GCC are installed.

Installation:

sudo make PREFIX=/usr install

For development, install soft links instead:

sudo make install-dev

Build all the samples:

make samples

Build dependencies

• go >= 1.3

Runtime dependencies

• yasm

Optional runtime dependencies

• gcc (for inline C support)
• elftools/sstrip (for even smaller binaries)
• binutils (for disassembling with objdump)
• dosbox (for running 16-bit executables) (only GCC 4.9 and up supports compiling to 16-bit with -m16)
• SDL 2 (must be compiled and installed manually if on Red Hat 6)
• tcc (for even smaller binaries, in many cases)

General info

• Version: 0.6.1
• License: MIT
• Author: Alexander F. Rødseth