Writing Portable ARM64 Assembly

Writing Portable ARM64 Assembly
ariadne.space

People have been writing non-portable assembly for pretty much every architecture for as long as assembly has been a thing.

Heck, people write non-portable C and C++ too by using compiler specific extensions or intrinsics all the time too, that only end up working on very specific stacks.

Or when you go to web and people target browser specific extensions and behaviour.

Developers will target and test the bare minimum of what they need to get the results they want.

Not to mention planned obsolescence of C and c++ syntax via ISO, that on a medium cycle (5/10 years).

With c++ it is even worse: its syntax complexity is grotesque and absurd, it requires beyond sanity compilers, hence limiting to very few the ones which actually "work". c++ and similar should be avoided like hell.

But C has already a waaaaay too rich and complex syntax: integer promotion, enum, switch, typedef should go away (and probably more), only sized primitive types (u8/16/32/64, s8/16/32/64, f32/64, or ub/uw/ud/uq...), only explicit casts (runtime/compile-time) with only implicit casts from literals and maybe pointers reducing to void*, only one loop keyword (loop{}), finally fix macro functions with variable arguments for good, explicit compile-time constant (don't rely on compiler optimisation), no anonymous code block, etc.

Sometimes I ask myself if I should code in SPIR-V instead of C...

In the view of all this, I now code assembly with a very simple and cheap SDK. Namely, I currently code x86_64. I still may code some plain and simple C, but I'll compile and run them with NOT gcc or clang (usually very small alternative C compilers, tinycc, cproc, etc), and I am carefull to stick to c89 with "benign" c99/c11.

As for arm64 assembly, I am not there yet. Additionally RISC-V is happening: namely I will favor a worldwide royalty free standard by default (which are not arm64 neither x86_64), and may still use some C reference implementation for arm64 targets.