From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jeff Subject: Re: Does anyone code in assembler today? Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 09:10:20 -0700 Sender: linux-assembly-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <200309180835.05190.jko@save-net.com> References: <200309110801.37516.rafael.diniz@ic.unicamp.br> <200309171020.17639.jko@save-net.com> <3F695140.60003@eprocess.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <3F695140.60003@eprocess.fr> 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 Cc: fmarmond@eprocess.fr On Wednesday 17 September 2003 11:31 pm, Frederic Marmond wrote: > I'm sad to say that assembly is baddly considered by most of 'new' > programmers, I think this is true of assembler programmers also. Some think it is difficult and use it for small projects. Other programmers find it easy and use it for big projects. This difference is interesting. What makes assembler useful for some programmers and of limited use for others? I know some of the answers but it is a complicated question. Here are some facts that look accurate to me: 1. Assembly can easily turn into a nightmare of spaghetti code. This requires functions and modules to be created carefully and at lower levels than other languages. 2. Most Assembler tools are awful and new programmers have not encountered good tools. 3. People are different and some people do not want to think about registers and such. 4. It is easy to make assembler difficult for others to understand. The use of macros and uncommented subroutines soon create a language only readable by the original programmer. 5. A good assembler library can make coding speed and results about the same as a high level language. Now, this point will probably create some argument. About the only way to prove it would be to have some timed trials. I've done a few over the years and found it true but creating the library in the first place was a big job. It is interesting we now have thousands of languages and still people are working on new languages. All these languages are not much different from assembler with different libraries. Anyway, I found assembler under Linux to be a nighmare at first. The tools were awful and the documentation was scattered around and written for "c" programmers. Now, with kdbg and a working nasm things are better but could be improved. It would be nice to have a good editor that recognized conditional statements and could show the code of interest. I don't really want to see code for Sun or AIX systems. Has anyone tried the new nasm 98.38 that was just released to fix ELF problems. It appears to still have the old problem of stuffing a zero in the generated code. Probably a memory leak in the "c" code. I wonder if we keep creating new languages and tools if someday our tools will become more complicated than the thing we are tying to code. Today we have all these different ways of doing "make" files and organizing projects. Communication tools for programmers working on the same project and tools to release programs. Our source code is full of conditional macros to support all the various flavors of UNIX. We have thousands of languages. On and on.. jeff (still looking for a asm project)