Whale command reference

Whale Build

In the Whale repository, run:

cargo build --release

A top-level executable file has four families of commands:

whale asm [--amd64 | --aarch64] <input> -o <output>
whale object <input> -o <output>
whale ir <subcommand> [options]

AMD64 assembler

whale asm --amd64 input.asm -o output.o

AMD64 assembler receives the .o path as output, and ELF64 relocatable containing section, symbol and relocation Create object.

Turn on detailed diagnostic output with --debug-whale.

whale asm --amd64 input.asm -o output.o \
  --debug-whale --token --ast --bytes --dump-hex --stats

Diagnostic flags include --token, --ast, --bytes, --dump-hex, --dump-bin, --dump-json, and --stats. --trace prints the processing progress.

Object wrapper

whale object input.bin -o output.o

The object command places raw bytes in an ELF64 .text section and adds a global start symbol at offset 0. It wraps raw machine code in an ELF object file.

Optional IR socket

The ir command is only included when Whale is built with the socket-cli feature.

cargo run -p whale --features socket-cli -- ir lower program.json
cargo run -p whale --features socket-cli -- ir lower program.json -o program.wir

ir lower reads JSON of Whale socket schema, converts it to Whale IR, and verifies the module. The text IR is output to the path stdout or -o. --target <triple> replaces the target string and --no-verify omits validation.

To use the IR command, Whale must be built with the socket-cli feature. Socket JSON producers and Whale must use the same socket schema version.