I have started messing around with the ASM API for a compiler project I am working on. However, I am finding that the documentation is less than clear for a newcomer in many places and I thought having a good solid example of generating a class that simply prints "Hello, World!" would be a great example to have on here.
Currently, I can generate a class with a main() (using the ClassWriter, ClassVisitor and MethodVisitor classes) but I can't seem to work out how to generate main's body. Could anyone give me an example of generating a class file in ASM that:
The ASM library is a project of the OW2 consortium. It provides a simple API for decomposing, modifying, and recomposing binary Java classes (i.e. bytecode). The project was originally conceived and developed by Eric Bruneton.
ASM simply stands for ASMifier tool.
A parser to make a ClassVisitor visit a ClassFile structure, as defined in the Java Virtual Machine Specification (JVMS). This class parses the ClassFile content and calls the appropriate visit methods of a given ClassVisitor for each field, method and bytecode instruction encountered.
Bytecode manipulation consists in modifying the classes - represented by bytecode - compiled by the Java compiler, at runtime. It is used extensively for instance by frameworks such as Spring (IoC) and Hibernate (ORM) to inject dynamic behaviour to Java objects at runtime.
You can compile a class using java, then get asm to print out the calls it would take to generate an equivalent class,
FAQ
ASMifierClassVisitor
The ASMifierClassVisitor javadocs actually has the hello world code in it,
import org.objectweb.asm.*;
public class HelloDump implements Opcodes {
public static byte[] dump() throws Exception {
ClassWriter cw = new ClassWriter(0);
FieldVisitor fv;
MethodVisitor mv;
AnnotationVisitor av0;
cw.visit(49,
ACC_PUBLIC + ACC_SUPER,
"Hello",
null,
"java/lang/Object",
null);
cw.visitSource("Hello.java", null);
{
mv = cw.visitMethod(ACC_PUBLIC, "<init>", "()V", null, null);
mv.visitVarInsn(ALOAD, 0);
mv.visitMethodInsn(INVOKESPECIAL,
"java/lang/Object",
"<init>",
"()V");
mv.visitInsn(RETURN);
mv.visitMaxs(1, 1);
mv.visitEnd();
}
{
mv = cw.visitMethod(ACC_PUBLIC + ACC_STATIC,
"main",
"([Ljava/lang/String;)V",
null,
null);
mv.visitFieldInsn(GETSTATIC,
"java/lang/System",
"out",
"Ljava/io/PrintStream;");
mv.visitLdcInsn("hello");
mv.visitMethodInsn(INVOKEVIRTUAL,
"java/io/PrintStream",
"println",
"(Ljava/lang/String;)V");
mv.visitInsn(RETURN);
mv.visitMaxs(2, 1);
mv.visitEnd();
}
cw.visitEnd();
return cw.toByteArray();
}
}
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