UTM lets us program in assembly language for 24 ISAs in any OS on macOS and iOS

[lucho]

Happy New Year!

Today I learned that the UTM system emulator allows running any operating system (OS) for 14 32-bit and 10 64-bit (a total of 24) instruction set architectures (ISAs) on macOS and iOS and hence programming in their assembly language. The ISAs are:

• aarch64
• alpha
• arm
• cris
• hppa (32/64)
• i386
• loongarch64
• m68k
• microblaze (BE/LE)
• mips (BE/LE)
• mips64 (BE/LE)
• or1k
• ppc
• ppc64
• riscv32
• riscv64
• s390x
• sh4 (LE/BE)
• sparc
• sparc64
• tricore
• x86_64
• xtensa (BE/LE)

UTM uses QEMU as its engine. It's a GUI wrapper for it. If the target ISA = the host ISA and the host OS = macOS, emulation runs at near native speed. Else it runs much more slowly, depending on the ISA.

To program in assembly language for an ISA, install UTM, create a virtual machine for the given OS, and then install a compiler, assembler and debugger in it. The specifics are OS- and product-dependent.