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Feb 1st, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by jbennet ...

have u guys tried menuetn os?

a whole os in assembly. its got a GUI and is under 5 meg

No, but then there are more OS's out there than you can shake a stick at.

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Feb 1st, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by mathematician ...

Anybody who writes a memory resident debugger, which can randomly interrupt the execution of a program at any point, will soon discover that the average app spends about 90% of its time executing operating system code. Therefore it can be as fast as the OS, and no faster.

Its a very bold (and 100% wrong) assumption that all computer systems have an OS or one that they're CPU bound upon.

You seem to be a very GUI/desktop centric person. I assure you, there's a whole world out there you've never seen.

You seem to hold the guts of an OS as some sort of impenetrable black box who's will we a simply subject to. Having spect a significant portion of my career in the guts of OS's and drivers, I can state this is not the case, and the cure for performance issues in OS's is often assembler code. In fact the guts of the OS/2 kernel were virtually all assembler with few exceptions (HPFS was mostly C). Run OS/2 on anything and compare it to Windows or Linux in terms of speed and responsivness. There is no comparason. All that assembler code beats the crap out of the C code systems.

Last edited by Purple Avenger; Feb 1st, 2007 at 8:34 pm.

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Feb 1st, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by jbennet ...

have u guys tried menuetn os?

a whole os in assembly. its got a GUI and is under 5 meg

OS/2 1.3 would run on a machine with well under 3M of memory, and the whole system shipped on about 8 or 9 1.44M diskettes (including display/printer drivers).

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Feb 1st, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Electronic Engineers use Assembly to program microcontrollers, used in just about everything like cars, microwaves, washing machines etc.

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Feb 2nd, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Quote ...

Anybody who writes a memory resident debugger, which can randomly interrupt the execution of a program at any point, will soon discover that the average app spends about 90% of its time executing operating system code. Therefore it can be as fast as the OS, and no faster.

And YOUR conclusion is: no matter what language you use or what code you write, final binaries will have the same speed ...

My conclusion: Assembly language can produce by far the fastest and smallest binaries, it is as easy (or difficult) as any other programming language. One can be AT LEAST as productive as can be with any other language because he/she will not be fighting with the HLL's limitations.

Antonis

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Feb 2nd, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by Purple Avenger ...

Its a very bold (and 100% wrong) assumption that all computer systems have an OS or one that they're CPU bound upon.

You seem to be a very GUI/desktop centric person. I assure you, there's a whole world out there you've never seen.

You seem to hold the guts of an OS as some sort of impenetrable black box who's will we a simply subject to. Having spect a significant portion of my career in the guts of OS's and drivers, I can state this is not the case, and the cure for performance issues in OS's is often assembler code. In fact the guts of the OS/2 kernel were virtually all assembler with few exceptions (HPFS was mostly C). Run OS/2 on anything and compare it to Windows or Linux in terms of speed and responsivness. There is no comparason. All that assembler code beats the crap out of the C code systems.

Most people aren't involved in writing operating systems - they are involved in writing apps. As it happens, the operating system I was referring to, with apps spending 90% of their time inside it, wasn't a GUI system.

Personally, I hadn't noticed Windows graphics being particularly slow; we are no longer in the age of 4.77MHz PC's, where every last clock cycle counted.

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Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by mathematician ...

we are no longer in the age of 4.77MHz PC's, where every last clock cycle counted.

That's why I'm reading Vista's hardware requirements are massive right?

I have more respect for your time than you do.

Last edited by Purple Avenger; Feb 2nd, 2007 at 7:50 pm.

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Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by akyprian ...

And YOUR conclusion is: no matter what language you use or what code you write, final binaries will have the same speed ...

Not so -- bad compilers or unoptimized code will produce slower binaries. Different compilers will produce very different binaries (*.exe) even with the same source code. That is one of the bench mark test that many companies perform on compilers.

Quote ...

My conclusion: Assembly language can produce by far the fastest and smallest binaries

Yes it could, but whether it does not not is highly dependent on the skills of the programmer.

Quote ...

One can be AT LEAST as productive as can be with any other language because he/she will not be fighting with the HLL's limitations.

Totally agree with that statement. Assembly language is the LEAST productive of all languages (except machine language of course). Which is why no one writes anything but trivial programs in assembly language. Assembly is nice to know for all programmers, but not very useful for anyone other than those who design write compilers or operating systems.

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Re: Assembly is used for?

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by Ancient Dragon ...

why no one writes anything but trivial programs in assembly language.

I assure you the OS/2 kernel, KBD, MOU, VIO, and base drivers code was non-trivial. It was all done in assembler.

In the 1.X and GA 2.0 version the PM graphics engine was assembler as well. The VGA and 8514 drivers was all assembler and large chunks of the XGA driver were assembler.

Gibson claims everything he does is assembler. don't know if that's true or not, but its what he claims.

I've got a 100,000 LOC test suite for the DOS Int 21 API that's done all in assembler.

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Feb 3rd, 2007

Re: Assembly is used for?

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Not so -- bad compilers or unoptimized code will produce slower binaries. Different compilers will produce very different binaries (*.exe) even with the same source code. That is one of the bench mark test that many companies perform on compilers.

Fully agree. This is why I use Assembly for all my programming needs. What I write is what my final binary will be. It 's only up to me to write good or bad code.

Quote ...

Yes it could, but whether it does not not is highly dependent on the skills of the programmer.

other things being equal, Assembly binaries are by far faster and smaller.

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Assembly language is the LEAST productive of all languages

If one writes 'real' applications and not toys is sure that it is the other way round. I am wondering, what kind of applications we are talking about.

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not very useful for anyone other than those who design write compilers or operating systems

speak for your self! I write mainly 32-bit applications for windows and I am VERY productive.

I am really wondering why one spends his time in an Assembly forum trying to persuade people that they are not productive! I hope it doesn't sound like and ad, my site (and many others) is a proof of what I am saying.

Antonis

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