From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jeff Subject: Does anyone code in assembler today? Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 10:20:17 -0700 Sender: linux-assembly-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <200309171020.17639.jko@save-net.com> References: <200309110801.37516.rafael.diniz@ic.unicamp.br> <200309111414.47716.wklux@yahoo.co.uk> <200309150730.23968.jko@save-net.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200309150730.23968.jko@save-net.com> Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-assembly-admin@mlists.in-berlin.de, linux-assembly@vger.kernel.org I guess most programmers work in Java one of the newer object oriented languages. Or maybe Linux is not ideal for assembler and the few remaining coders use other platforms? The level of activity on this list and others indicate the assembler community is not very active. That is one indicator. Another is the number of people interested in new programs. Ten years ago when i released a program, a large number of people jumped on it to look at the code. My release of a few days ago resulted in three responses. So.. maybe we are a small community which is difficult to join? That's OK, there is always a niche for small fast code and as systems mature the competition moves from features to speed. I think this happened to some extent with DOS. Once it matured the companies needed something new to sell. They had a problem with the competition building fast programs optimized in .asm. This happened with spreadsheets and other programs. Of course, the argument is that hardware is getting faster and speed is no longer an issue. Also, memory is cheap and big bloated programs are best because they get into the market quickly. It is much easier to train programmers in the newer languages and todays tools isolates everyone from knowing much about hardware or hex. So.. i wonder if it would be better to port some old DOS libraries to work under X or stay with the console? I see some asm activity in graphics and games. There is also the embedded linux area... jeff (looking for an interesting asm project)