A note regarding portability: The assembler, 'as', is no longer a required program on developer machines.
FreeBSD 14.0 ships with clang as default compiler, and clang has an embedded assembler. Yes, one can install the 'binutils' package and then gets a /usr/local/bin/as program, but it is not part of the default installation. For a long time already, it was easier to invoke $CC -c foo.s or $CC -c -x none foo.s rather than as -c foo.s because the compiler front end took over the jobs of - determining the location of the assembler (not necessarily in /usr/bin), - determining the ABI and CPU related flags to pass to the assembler. Now, 'as' can be gone entirely. 'clang -print-prog-name=as' still prints 'as', even when there is no 'as' any more. clang has an option '-no-integrated-as', to force the use of a separate assembler instead of the embedded one. But when there is no 'as' any more, a command with that option fails. Bruno
