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The Art of 64-bit Assembly

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Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#71

Post by rescbr »

sousousou wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #6

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.

Yep. In my experience, LLMs easily go in circles with even simple assembly, creating fixes that result in 2x slower code and then fixing those with even slower code. They are pretty great as a reference or finding needle in the haystack bugs though!

This is definitely not my experience with GLM-5.2. It is writing pretty good ARM SIMD code.

It also is an excellent radare2/rizin/ghidra driver as well. Maybe it's because its ~cyber~ capabilities (pretty much linked with assembly-level knowledge) aren't guardrailed off?

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#72

Post by MaskRay »

Interesting to see that people are still spending much time on assembly languages :) I've had a lot of fun with it in recent years as well. (Shameless plug: I've written a few on LLVM integrated assembler regarding better fragments and improving expressions and relocations).

When comparing GNU Assembler and MASM, GAS is missing many features: while loop, string processing (.e.g strlen)

> page 3: "It’s important to understand that MASM converts macro invocation arguments to text values before doing the macro expansion"

Like MASM, GAS uses call-by-name evaluation by default. While GAS's altmacro mode does allow for expression evaluation using syntax like `%(1+2)`, it has strict limitations: it only supports absolute expressions and is restricted to argument positions.

In contrast, MASM's % operator (page 8) looks far more general.

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#73

Post by mathisfun123 »

skippyfish wrote: post #66

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…

this is what almost every hn post is: lowbrow reflexive/reactionary responses. it's been like this for years. try to call it out and you'll be censured by dang or one of the other police officers for being "uncharitable" or something like that

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#74

Post by tengwar2 »

Retr0id wrote: post #69
b5n wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most pleasant is the one you're most familiar with. I still use gas with at&t syntax.

MASM's niceties go far beyond just syntax, though

I last used MASM back in about 1989 (with MS C on OS/2 1.0). Do you have any hints on how it has changed since then? What is nice about it, and why does the debugger not match up to CodeView?

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#75

Post by lexicality »

skippyfish wrote: post #66

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…

I own volume 1 and when it first arrived I dropped it on my foot and had to go to the doctor. I have not got around to reading it again. His original x86 ASM book was good though.

I also read his Write Great Code series and generally found it to have some pretty good advice, but it was also full of things like recommendations to never trust compilers and to write lots of arcane unreadable magic code to unlock ultimate speedy hacker cred.

That being said, if you want to learn about ASM in TYOOL 2026 then you could do a lot worse than learning it from someone who doesn't trust compilers and does everything themselves.

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#77

Post by rustyminnow »

asibahi wrote: post #53
tensegrist wrote: post #11

i'm sorry, starting with "you can ask AI to … [but it'll do an incomplete and bad job]" and then launching forth into a hundred words of AI-produced text is not very appetizing i hope this is the publisher's fault and the author replaces it with something decent of their own. contrary to the opinions i've heard around (including elsewhere on this thread) learning asm is still meaningful today and it's something i'd l…

This text doesn’t seem AI generated to me.

(disclaimer: I'm not anti-ai nor do I think ai automatically makes something bad, _but_...)

To me, it's all fairly human-ai neutral except for this sentence which is oh-so AI cliche and casts doubt on the rest of it:

> This volume of The Art of 64-Bit Assembly closes the gap between a plausible explanation and genuine understanding.

"closes the gap" is a favored phrase by our artificial friends and the phrases "plausible explanation" and "genuine understanding" are just... so ... dramatic for the context.

The rest of it is pretty tame in comparison. In my armchair opinion, I'd guess it's mostly a composite of (professional) human-written/ai-revised and/or vice versa. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Re: The Art of 64-bit Assembly

#80

Post by anta40 »

Someone wrote: post #19

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.

Not exactly weird... I mean x64 Windows is still pretty popular. And pretty much any Windows dev will have Visual Studio installed (to get MASM).

Unless, you want to use open source MASM-compatible assemblers like JWASM or UASM.

Yes I understand, other folks may prefer Linux/BSD, NASM/FASM, ARM etc etc.

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