User:RCX/MASM

Alternative Assemblers
This section should not appear in this topic. It has been left here so that the information is not lost.

In the 1990s alternative assemblers such as Borland TASM, the shareware assembler A86, and NASM began to take some of MASM's market share. However, two events in the late 1990s allowed MASM to retain much of its market share. First, Microsoft ceased selling MASM as a commercial product and began distributing it free of charge as part of the Driver development kit. The MASM32 package and Iczelion's Win32 tutorials appeared, making Windows application programming with MASM possible.

Today, MASM is still the most popular assembler, despite competition from new products such as NASM and Yasm, FASM, and HLA. There are several other assemblers which either use MASM's syntax or are designed for Windows, including RosAsm, POASM, GoASM and JWasm.

RosAsm is a monolithic assembler and IDE distributed under the GPL licence. POASM comes with Pelles C and is freeware while JWasm is a open source fork of the Open Watcom assembler.