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Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful x86 assembly code?
91–93 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful x86 assembly code?
#92The very first programming book I read was a programmed instruction text on Machine Language. This would have been in 1965, and the book probably dated from a few years earlier. It was another four years before I could actually run a program on a real computer (an Algol program on a Burroughs B5500, input via punched cards).
I tried to find the book a few years back, for nostalgic reasons, but couldn't.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful x86 assembly code?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the biggest problem with learning x86 assembly (or ARM or anything else) on modern systems (or more specifically modern operating systems). It’s sometimes difficult to think about the assembly code in situ when you start to think about the operating system doing a ton of context switching and paging etc. in the background, which can distract your thought process from what’s right in front of you (as w…
The whole point of how interrupt handling works is that it returns back to the same state of the program already in progress when finished. The abstraction is such that the interrupted program doesn't need to care. Even in those "old" systems of single address spaces and no protection, you're constantly getting timer interrupts, interrupts for I/O, etc., which your application might not have installed its own handler…
I agree - my main point is that an OS is ‘just a program’ as well
I suspect we’re both making a similar point in a roundabout way - the operating system is both another layer of abstraction on top of the Instruction Set, while also making the programming process for that chipset somewhat easier (providing software interrupts etc. at the expense of bare metal understanding).
My argument is loosely that modern (x64) assembly is not so much targeting hardware as it is programming into a software abstraction (the operating system).