Assembly, een van de oudste programmeertalen, wordt tegenwoordig vaak gebruikt voor het optimaliseren van toepassingen. Yasm is ooit begonnen als tegenhanger van Nasm, maar dan uitgegeven onder de BSD-licentie. Hierbij moet worden vermeld dat ook Nasm sinds versie 2.07 uit 2009 onder deze licentie wordt uitgebracht. Het programma kan assembly-code omzetten in verschillende binaire objectformaten zoals elf, coff, Mach-O, win32 en win64. De programmeurs hebben onlangs versie 1.0.0 van Yasm de deur uitgedaan met de volgende beschrijving:
Target Audience:
Welcome to the 1.0.0 release of the Yasm Modular Assembler. Its target audience includes people who want to:Changes from 0.8.0 to 1.0.0:
- use a mature NASM-syntax x86 and AMD64 assembler that can target Win32, Win64, MacOS X, and Unix derivatives;
- use a GAS-syntax assembler other than GAS;
- have assembly source-level debugging using either DWARF2 or CodeView 8.0 (Visual Studio 2005 and later);
- have a free software assembler that supports Win32/Win64 structured exception handling (SEH) and ELF32/ELF64 thread local storage (TLS);
- target the latest AMD XOP/FMA4/CVT16 or Intel AVX instruction sets;
- have a free assembler highly integrated into the Visual Studio 2010 IDE;
- keep track of Yasm's progress in terms of stability and feature set;
- contribute to Yasm development from a new release.
- Add GAS preprocessor (fixes #79, contributed by Alexei Svitkine).
- Add Visual Studio 2010 special frontend, vsyasm (suggested by Brian Gladman).
- Add support for AMD XOP, FMA4, and CVT16 instructions (replacing SSE5).
- Add support for %scope and %endscope NASM macros (contributed by Mathieu Monnier).
- Add support for %{x:y} parameter list expansion in NASM preprocessor (contributed by Mathieu Monnier).
- Fix _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_ (reported by Mark Charney, Intel).
- Add support for ELF64 PC-relative relocations and latest ELF32 relocation types.
- Add support for ELF tlsdesc, tlscall, pltoff, gotplt, gotoff special symbols.
- NASM preprocessor license has been changed to 2-clause BSD.
- Various bugfixes in TASM syntax support.
- Many other bugfixes (including #173, #175, #177, #178, #184, #185, #186, #187, #188, #189, #190, #191, #193, #198).