[OT] Re: nasm over gas?

From: Ihar 'Philips' Filipau
Date: Mon Sep 08 2003 - 10:10:57 EST


Richard B. Johnson wrote:

I strongly suggest that if you have an interest in assembly, you
cultivate that interest. Soon most all mundane coding will be
performed by machine from a specification written by "Sales".
The only "real" programming will be done by those who can make
the interface between the hardware and the "coding machine". That's
assembly!


I have a long standing dispute with one of my friend: once he has said 'asm is dead - every one is using C/C++ now'.

Those I wasn't able to counter this claim. TSR programmes gone together with DOS, and ordinary desktops started challenging expensive workstations.

But little bit later I caught an example: Palm OS. Yes. A lot of stuff is written in Asm. Why? Because *size does matter*: size == price, bigger application - more expensive it is for your customer. C was not able to compete with Asm.

But now we have hand-helds/mobiles which do run Windoz/Linux. Run them almost unmodified/unstripped. Cool. C/C++ rules. Windoz CE with VBA - dream of idiot.

Asm dead again? No-o-o-o. L3/L4 switch we are doing utilizes special micro-controller, which can be programmed in dialect of MIPS assembler. It has fast RAM for 4K of insn's and executes in real-time. I didn't saw C compiler for this - but this is really exotic example. But still example - Asm is far from being dead.

What will be next? In my short carrier I saw as Asm was dying three times. But I beleive it will reborn over and over again ;-)))

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