What's the difference between equ and db in NASM?

Question

len:  equ  2
len:  db   2

Are they the same, producing a label that can be used instead of 2? If not, then what is the advantage or di

Answer 1

equ: preprocessor time. analogous to #define but most assemblers are lacking an #undef, and can't have anything but an atomic constant of fixed number of bytes on the right hand side, so floats, doubles, lists are not supported with most assemblers' equ directive.

db: compile time. the value stored in db is stored in the binary output by the assembler at a specific offset. equ allows you define constants that normally would need to be either hardcoded, or require a mov operation to get. db allows you to have data available in memory before the program even starts.

Here's a nasm demonstrating db:

; I am a 16 byte object at offset 0.
    db '----------------'

; I am a 14 byte object at offset 16
; the label foo makes the assembler remember the current 'tell' of the 
; binary being written.
foo:
    db 'Hello, World!', 0

; I am a 2 byte filler at offset 30 to help readability in hex editor.
    db ' .'

; I am a 4 byte object at offset 16 that the offset of foo, which is 16(0x10).
    dd foo

An equ can only define a constant up to the largest the assembler supports

example of equ, along with a few common limitations of it.

; OK
ZERO equ 0

; OK(some assemblers won't recognize \r and will need to look up the ascii table to get the value of it).
CR equ 0xD
; OK(some assemblers won't recognize \n and will need to look up the ascii table to get the value of it).
LF equ 0xA

; error: bar.asm:2: warning: numeric constant 102919291299129192919293122 -
; does not fit in 64 bits
; LARGE_INTEGER equ 102919291299129192919293122

; bar.asm:5: error: expression syntax error
; assemblers often don't support float constants, despite fitting in
; reasonable number of bytes. This is one of the many things
; we take for granted in C, ability to precompile floats at compile time
; without the need to create your own assembly preprocessor/assembler.
; PI equ 3.1415926 

; bar.asm:14: error: bad syntax for EQU
; assemblers often don't support list constants, this is something C
; does support using define, allowing you to define a macro that
; can be passed as a single argument to a function that takes multiple.
; eg
; #define RED 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00
; glVertex4f(RED);
; #undef RED
;RED equ 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00

the resulting binary has no bytes at all because equ does not pollute the image; all references to an equ get replaced by the right hand side of that equ.