The license for this is effectively nonfree, I don't really see why anyone would use this over nasm or a plethora of excellent free assemblers.

I think this project could need some more information about who and what this project is for.

I've spent some minutes trying to figure out what it does, and I'm not yet sure. I have a vague idea that it is somewhat similar to certain aspects of LLVM, but please enlighten me.

It's an assembler.

It's a tool that reads assembly-language source code (for an impressively large array of actual target CPUs), in various syntaxes.

It converts the text into the corresponding machine code bytes, while optionally applying various machine-specific optimizations (like making branches short when possible and so on).

It then emits the resulting bits in any of a bunch of handy executable file formats.

Very impressive, and just what I was looking for the other week to build some old Amiga code of mine. :)

Thanks - this clarifies a lot.

I was confused with the "retargetable" part, which made me think about LLVM's backend compiler architecture.

Can't seem to find details of the license this is distributed under. Anyone know/ see something I'm missing?

> This archive may be redistributed without modifications and used for non-commercial purposes.

> Distributing modified versions and commercial usage needs my written consent.

http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/release/vasm.html#Legal-7