Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fresh IDE

fresh.flatassembler.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Fresh IDE

#41

Post by pjmlp »

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.…

Actually the only Assembler I got disappointed with bare macros support is gas.

I never used FASM, being an old MS-DOS grey beard, but tasm/masm macros were quite powerful, specially after MASM 6.0.

So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros.

Regarding the educational purpose with macros, are you aware that TI has some CPUs with an Assembler that looks like C--, or that AS/400 Assembly supports objects?

Re: Fresh IDE

#42

Post by pjmlp »

ungzd wrote: post #25

I don't know what are use cases for that. Nowadays, if you are coding in assembly, you are probably doing some kernel things, embedding asm in C/C++ (for SIMD or something like that and not because compilers generate bad code), embedded code for microcontrollers or retro computers (i.e. ZX Spectrum). But Visual Studio-like IDE for making x86 application software, with GUI editor seems weird.

Assembly IDEs are still quite common on embedded space, and TASM back in the day had a Turbo Vision based IDE on MS-DOS.

And on the Amiga we had DevPac.

Re: Fresh IDE

#43

Post by kronos29296 »

dkersten wrote: post #38
Uehreka wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entire thing is writted in FASM assembler. So maybe they thought a normal gui toolkit is too heavy weight for asm.

Re: Fresh IDE

#44

Post by twic »

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)

For the complete list, look for occurrances of "HTTP/1.1" in the source:

https://2ton.com.au/library_as_html/webserver.inc.html

Re: Fresh IDE

#45

Post by sqldba »

pjmlp wrote: post #41
wruza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Actually the only Assembler I got disappointed with bare macros support is gas. I never used FASM, being an old MS-DOS grey beard, but tasm/masm macros were quite powerful, specially after MASM 6.0. So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros. Regarding the educational purpose with macros, are you aware that TI has some CPUs with an Assembler that looks like C--, or that AS/400 Assembly supports objects?

I liked the MASM 6 macros for some reason. It was blasphemy to others at the time though.

Re: Fresh IDE

#46

Post by wruza »

pjmlp wrote: post #41
wruza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Actually the only Assembler I got disappointed with bare macros support is gas. I never used FASM, being an old MS-DOS grey beard, but tasm/masm macros were quite powerful, specially after MASM 6.0. So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros. Regarding the educational purpose with macros, are you aware that TI has some CPUs with an Assembler that looks like C--, or that AS/400 Assembly supports objects?

I think masm 6.0 was a time when Watcom went popular [or just known to me] and I was very disappointed of my asm skill that lost ~x2 both in time and size for Brezenham's. I couldn't even understand what exactly Watcom did for so wow, much performance, and I gave up finally :(

So take my words with grain of salt.

>So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros. >TI ...

My experience lays completely in intel 80* range. I'm provincial-ussr born, so even a regular PC-compatible was almost unobtainable until circa '95.

Re: Fresh IDE

#48

Post by mhd »

pjmlp wrote: post #41
wruza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Actually the only Assembler I got disappointed with bare macros support is gas. I never used FASM, being an old MS-DOS grey beard, but tasm/masm macros were quite powerful, specially after MASM 6.0. So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros. Regarding the educational purpose with macros, are you aware that TI has some CPUs with an Assembler that looks like C--, or that AS/400 Assembly supports objects?

Back in the day, there was a bit of a hierarchy amongst home computer users, with Amiga assembly programmers deriding x86 syntax.

I also knew a few people who nominally programmedi in Turbo Pascal, but whose code was 70% inline assembly...

And weirdly enough, a few marooned Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC programmers waxing poetic about their ARMs.

(And if there ever was some niche of a "MenuetOS"-like OS, it would probably be for the Raspberry Pi)

Re: Fresh IDE

#49

Post by wolfgke »

Encounter wrote: post #6
TylerE wrote: post #2

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

Or if the site was usable on mobile.

Rather tell this to the vendor of your preferred mobile browser.

Re: Fresh IDE

#50

Post by harveywi »

johnfound wrote: post #40
zoul wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for sharing! This is really interesting, especially the part about the reduced count of abstraction layers. Do you think the abstraction layers are the problem, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of "abstractions" that materialize in modern high-level software are leaky?
Post reply on HN