abaresk / asm-differ

Diff script for MIPS assembly

asm-differ

Nice differ for assembly code. Currently supports MIPS, PPC, AArch64, ARM32, SH2, SH4, and m68k; should be easy to hack to support other instruction sets.

Dependencies

• Python >= 3.6
• python3 -m pip install --user colorama watchdog levenshtein cxxfilt (also dataclasses if on 3.6)

Usage

Create a file diff_settings.py in some directory (see the one in this repo for an example). Then from that directory, run

/path/to/diff.py [flags] (function|rom addr)

Recommended flags are -mwo (automatically run make on source file changes, and include symbols in diff). See --help for more details.

Tab completion

argcomplete can be optionally installed (with python3 -m pip install argcomplete) to enable tab completion in a bash shell, completing options and symbol names using the linker map. It also requires a bit more setup:

If invoking the script exactly as ./diff.py, the following should be added to the .bashrc according to argcomplete's instructions:

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete ./diff.py)"

If that doesn't work, run register-python-argcomplete ./diff.py in your terminal and copy the output to .bashrc.

If setup correctly (don't forget to restart the shell), complete | grep ./diff.py should output:

complete -o bashdefault -o default -o nospace -F _python_argcomplete ./diff.py

Note for developers or for general troubleshooting: run export _ARC_DEBUG= to enable debug output during tab-completion, it may show otherwise silenced errors. Use unset _ARC_DEBUG or restart the terminal to disable.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! Some notes on workflow:

black is used for code formatting. You can either run black diff.py manually, or set up a pre-commit hook:

pip install pre-commit black
pre-commit install

Type annotations are used for all Python code. mypy should pass without any errors. (This is all checked in CI.)

There are a handful of unit tests (test.py), however a comparison-based regression test suite is still missing. There are loose plans on adding one using scratches from decomp.me as a corpus. Help on this front appreciated!

The targeted Python version is 3.7.