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Weird title for a book on assembly - for x64 - on Windows - using MASM There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.
Weird title for a book on assembly - for x64 - on Windows - using MASM There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.
Randell’s got another (large) book on ARM assembly. He’s also got a handful of other great books on software engineering in general - he’s more than aware that “there are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.”
This particular title, “the art of assembly” has been around for a while. This x64 version is the latest iteration - it’s a great book compared to the previous version which introduced and focused on “high-level-assembly”, basically a collection of masm macros that effectively constituted a small language.
It’s fair to say that anyone even remotely interested on x86/64 assembly is aware of AoA.
Weird title for a book on assembly - for x64 - on Windows - using MASM There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.
If you're actually writing software in assembly (as opposed to merely optimizing hot functions in an otherwise high-level codebase), in my experience MASM is the most pleasant tool for the job.
> what Windows actually expects the vtable to look like I'm not a Windows-knower, are vtable layouts part of the user kernel ABI?
All of the major kernel ABIs are using C function interfaces as their stable ABI (except Linux, which uses an assembly syscall instruction as the stable interface, although you still rely on a lot of the ancillary C ABI for things like struct layout or stack layout). For C++ ABIs, there are really only 2.5 major ABIs: the MSVC ABI, used by MSVC and clang wanting to be compatible with MSVC, and the Itanium ABI, used f…
That used to be the case anyway. It's possible they binned the C support in the switch to 64-bit. I haven't looked since.
But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?
I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right? But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what wou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This text doesn’t seem AI generated to me.
We've really gotten to the point that certain styles seem AI generated in many cases because many folks are poor writers and anything past a high school level is difficult for them. I'm not speaking in this case specifically, just in general. It's also one of the reasons its insanely popular in ESL countries and frustrating/disliked in English-speaking countries because it makes things easier in one and harder in the…
The thing that frustrates me the most about AI is how every thread in every forum spend half the time arguing whether an article is AI or not, as if bad writing only started to exist with AI. Just fucking don't read it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're actually writing software in assembly (as opposed to merely optimizing hot functions in an otherwise high-level codebase), in my experience MASM is the most pleasant tool for the job.
The most pleasant is the one you're most familiar with. I still use gas with at&t syntax.
Is anyone still writing assembly in the age of LLMs? Asking seriously because most assembly is just doing one very simple thing very fast and because it's so simple conceptually, an LLM can easily code it without errors.
I wrote a lisp compiler recently, and that involved generating assembly language. My output is linux/amd64 assembly language which is compiled by nasm. I don't link to glibc, so I had to implement my "print int", "print string", and similar primitives in raw assembly. I successfully implemented a stop© garbage collector, and other interfaces to the OS such as reading command-line arguments, environmental variable…
But assembly? I'm not sure, honestly. Architectures change, and you can easily converge to good code by talking to an LLM.
May I ask why you didn't use LLVM as a target?