I wonder if this was released due to Xen's recent x86 instruction emulation bugs.

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-9932

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-9383

Seems like this would make one able to write the object-code codegen phase of a compiler at a rather higher level (at least if you're only targeting x86, or are willing to write similar libraries for your other arch targets.)

Or, to put it another way: looks like a good library for adding "just a bit of JIT" to an interpreter, without going full LLVM.

"As new instructions are made public"? WTF does that mean? We're not even allowed to know the full instruction set of an X86 CPU?

This is awesome. I thought it's closed source. I wonder how close it is to the hardware.

Can I assume that whatever is parsed by XED is going to be parsed in the same way by real CPU's?

How does this compare to ARM's VIXL?

[1] https://github.com/armvixl/vixl

About time they open sourced it. Funny how it is Python according to github :)

Looks handy. Thanks for posting, Dan.

Something that is universal is not remarkable. People will not make as much use of an unremarkable opportunity as they will of a remarkable one.