Logically this makes fine sense, but for whatever reason, I don't think I've ever encountered a popular open source program that required a specific assembler other than 'gas' unless the entire codebase was written for that assembler. I don't think I've encountered it in academic code either.

But for whatever reason I've encountered a few that distribute NASM or another assembler. I don't know exactly why this would be. I'm trying to find out. Do you have examples where requiring NASM (or another assembler) as an external dependency has worked for projects in the past? I'm sure they must exist --- I just don't know of any.