Here I take you through building a simple app which wraps itself around four lines of ARM64 assembly code, and provides a platform for subsequent articles. This article is the first of what I hope will be a series to open up access to assembly coding for Apple Silicon Macs. Apple’s developer information is most helpful to those who already write assembly and are accustomed to its quirks. Although there are several good books about ARM assembly (see references), using it in Xcode apps is not well documented. Learning a little assembly language is not only good for the soul, but it has value for anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of a processor, those who want to read disassembled code such as security researchers, and anyone writing code in a higher-level language such as Objective-C or Swift.
