Getting started

BitterASM comes as two programs:

• bitterasm, the compiler. It reads .basm source, expands every macro, and writes the values the program emits to a .em file.
• bitter, an evaluator. It reads a .em file and packs its values into machine-code bytes.

Keeping them separate is deliberate. bitterasm knows nothing about bits, bytes or machine code: it only produces a stream of values. What those values mean is up to whichever evaluator reads them, and bitter is the one that turns them into binary. See Evaluators.

This chapter covers:

• Installation: building and installing both programs and the standard library.
• Your first program: assembling two RISC-V instructions, and then a program that emits plain numbers.
• The toolchain: every bitterasm and bitter command.