In previous work, we presented a formalism for a statically typed, idealized assembly language called TAL. The goal of TAL was to provide an extremely low-level, statically-typed target language that is better suited than Java bytecodes for supporting a wide variety of source languages and a number of important optimizations.
In this paper, we present our progress in defining and implementing a realistic typed assembly language called TALx86. The TALx86 instructions comprise a relatively complete fragment of the Intel IA32 (32-bit 80x86 flat model) assembly language and are thus executable on processors such as the Intel Pentium. The type system for the language incorporates a number of advanced features necessary for safely compiling large programs to good code.
To motivate the design of the type system, we present a type-safe, C-based language called Popcorn and show how various Popcorn features are compiled to TALx86.