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Fresh IDE

fresh.flatassembler.net

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Re: Fresh IDE

#31

Post by wruza »

2ton_jeff wrote: post #23
zerr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the assembly we remember from TASM/MASM days though. It seems to include quite many high level constructs.

fasm was in fact modelled after early TASM, and much of the "high level constructs" are just macros... or did you mean something more specific?

At the time I lost my interest to assembly, it had pretty high-level contructs like looping, function frames, structs, etc. via macros. Macros of fasm are iirc recursive, so its power is far more than usual assembler. I would put it at 85% on [regular asm .. non-optimized C] scale. You can think of tasm/masm as of lisp with cpp instead of macros.

The use case beyond educational purpose is still unclear to me though. Especially with macros.

Re: Fresh IDE

#32

Post by johnfound »

wruza wrote: post #31
2ton_jeff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fasm was in fact modelled after early TASM, and much of the "high level constructs" are just macros... or did you mean something more specific?

At the time I lost my interest to assembly, it had pretty high-level contructs like looping, function frames, structs, etc. via macros. Macros of fasm are iirc recursive, so its power is far more than usual assembler. I would put it at 85% on [regular asm .. non-optimized C] scale. You can think of tasm/masm as of lisp with cpp instead of macros. The use case beyond educational purpose is still unclear to me though.…

You always can reduce the usage the of macros or make them more assembly-centric. Check the Fresh IDE sources as an example of moderate macro use.

On the other hand, definition of complex data structures is much easier with powerful macro engine.

Re: Fresh IDE

#33

Post by vanderZwan »

johnfound wrote: post #21
rbanffy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Windows is a lost cause, but Unix apps don't have to be ugly like that ;-) And even Windows can use GTK.

I am working on v3.0 that will use its own portable GUI toolkit (in assembly language) with much prettier UI. On this page you can see some preliminary experimental screenshots: https://fresh.flatassembler.net/index.cgi?page=content/artic... Still not GTK though. It is too heavy for assembly language programming and will not allow portability for example on MenuetOS or KolibriOS assembly written OSes.

Nice improvement! The screenshots have much nicer font rendering (and a better font, for that matter). The fact that it uses more than the 16 colours that were available in Windows 3.1 helps a lot too.

Re: Fresh IDE

#34

Post by chris_wot »

2ton_jeff wrote: post #7
chrisparton1991 wrote: post #3

The HTTP response code for fresh.flatassembler.net assets is "200 She'll be apples", I didn't know 200s could be customised like that :)

Hahah, proper Aussie mate! (there's a compile-time flag to make them all boring instead of our homage to Aussie slang haha, cheers and glad you like it)

Is there a book that teaches how to use assembly with Fresh IDE?

Re: Fresh IDE

#35

Post by mikeyjk »

chrisparton1991 wrote: post #16
2ton_jeff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahah, proper Aussie mate! (there's a compile-time flag to make them all boring instead of our homage to Aussie slang haha, cheers and glad you like it)

I'm an Aussie too :) I didn't expect to see slang popping up in Chrome DevTools though haha.

I'm an Aussie also born in 91 and I have never heard that expression before. The "she'll be" made me wonder though!

Re: Fresh IDE

#36

Post by shash7 »

On a side note, check out how they have laid out the curved screenshot.

It is apparently a stack of images. That helps setting the text to follow the couture of the curve.

Re: Fresh IDE

#37

Post by zoul »

johnfound wrote: post #30
osrec wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. Do you not find the dev process significantly slower than using a higher level language?

About twice slower than in HLL, with code reusing of course. But the code is more reliable and the debugging process is much easier. After some short debugging stage, most of the projects runs for years without single bug report or other support issues. I am not talking about the significantly higher speed, lower memory footprint and better UX (especially the response time of the UI is really much faster). As a whole…

Interesting. Are you sure the increase in code reliability goes down to the language and not your skills? It feels quite contrary to my experience that a lower-level language would be more reliable.

Re: Fresh IDE

#38

Post by dkersten »

Uehreka wrote: post #13
TylerE wrote: post #2

It would make a better first impression if your hero screenshot didn't have font rendering from circa 1995.

I know that comment seems superficial, but when I saw the Windows 98 style GUI, I actually thought that perhaps this was an abandoned project someone was bringing up for nostalgic purposes.

Yeah, I find it funny that a project called Fresh has such a dated looking GUI style :D

It does look like an interesting project though, if you can ignore the fugly widget styles.

Re: Fresh IDE

#39

Post by johnfound »

chris_wot wrote: post #34
2ton_jeff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahah, proper Aussie mate! (there's a compile-time flag to make them all boring instead of our homage to Aussie slang haha, cheers and glad you like it)

Is there a book that teaches how to use assembly with Fresh IDE?

Well, no, there is no "book" in the real meaning of this word.

But some documentation is available in the "Documentation" section of the web site and inside the "Help|Help file" (Ctrl+F1) menu in the IDE itself.

There are small example and template projects as well.

Also the FASM forum is a good place to ask: https://board.flatassembler.net

Re: Fresh IDE

#40

Post by johnfound »

zoul wrote: post #37
johnfound wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About twice slower than in HLL, with code reusing of course. But the code is more reliable and the debugging process is much easier. After some short debugging stage, most of the projects runs for years without single bug report or other support issues. I am not talking about the significantly higher speed, lower memory footprint and better UX (especially the response time of the UI is really much faster). As a whole…

Interesting. Are you sure the increase in code reliability goes down to the language and not your skills? It feels quite contrary to my experience that a lower-level language would be more reliable.

Well, I am pretty average programmer. Not the worst, not the best.

The code reliability of assembly programs is better because programming algorithms in low level, the programmer controls every aspect of the execution. Notice, that excessive use of code generation macros will cancel this advantage.

Another advantage is that the bugs in assembly programs usually cause immediate crash of the program and this making the fixing easy.

Defer crashes and strange/random/undefined behavior of bugs in assembly programs is rare. IMO, this is because of reduced count of abstraction layers.

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