java disassembler/assembler

[Daniel Reynaud]

Hello,


>Thanks for doing this! This Java space desparately needs these tools and
>I've often wondered how we been able to get this far without them
>(although Jasmin does sort of work).

I was confronted with the same question. The short answer is : Sun didn't 
release its internal tools for bytecode manipulation and never published an 
assembly specification. And javap doesn't really help. The real mystery is : 
why do the few existing disassemblers all do the same, they are basically 
subsets of javap.


>Execellent. Hopefully this will also be extended to Jasmin. One of the
>main bottlenecks for writing tests for the class file parsing of a VM is
>that is hard to produce broken class files in a standardised way.

Well, I am defining an updated version of the Jasmin language for that 
purpose. The new version would offer :

- edition of the bytecode version
- support for StackMap attributes
- branch targets as offsets or labels (currently there are only labels)

If you have any ideas or features you would like to see included just tell 
me, because I am actively working on it and plan to release a beta version 
soon.

Regards,
Daniel