Fresh IDE
fresh.flatassembler.net
fresh.flatassembler.net
The use case beyond educational purpose is still unclear to me though. Especially with macros.
On the other hand, definition of complex data structures is much easier with powerful macro engine.
I never used FASM, being an old MS-DOS grey beard, but tasm/masm macros were quite powerful, specially after MASM 6.0.
So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros.
Regarding the educational purpose with macros, are you aware that TI has some CPUs with an Assembler that looks like C--, or that AS/400 Assembly supports objects?
So take my words with grain of salt.
>So I never got the idea they were like cpp macros. >TI ...
My experience lays completely in intel 80* range. I'm provincial-ussr born, so even a regular PC-compatible was almost unobtainable until circa '95.
I also knew a few people who nominally programmedi in Turbo Pascal, but whose code was 70% inline assembly...
And weirdly enough, a few marooned Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC programmers waxing poetic about their ARMs.
(And if there ever was some niche of a "MenuetOS"-like OS, it would probably be for the Raspberry Pi)
Anything that actually required extracting performance out of the system was straight Assembly, which I why it is ironic that new generations think that C compilers were generating fast code since day one.
I also knew a few people that did it like that, to save money on an Assembler.
Also, there is a popup menu at left with the navigation links. Although, the repository interface is not very mobile friendly.
Thanks for the report!
If anyone else is wondering, here's the direct link to repo browser: https://fresh.flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fresh/dir?ci=tip...
But Visual Studio-like IDE for making x86 application software, with GUI editor seems weird.
And most of they are application programming (Fresh IDE itself and many closed source projects in my work) or even web programming (https://board.asm32.info).
That is why I needed a powerful IDE, suitable for rapid programming of relatively big projects (500Kloc or higher).
But the code is more reliable and the debugging process is much easier. After some short debugging stage, most of the projects runs for years without single bug report or other support issues.
I am not talking about the significantly higher speed, lower memory footprint and better UX (especially the response time of the UI is really much faster).
As a whole the advantages are more than disadvantages IMHO.
The code reliability of assembly programs is better because programming algorithms in low level, the programmer controls every aspect of the execution. Notice, that excessive use of code generation macros will cancel this advantage.
Another advantage is that the bugs in assembly programs usually cause immediate crash of the program and this making the fixing easy.
Defer crashes and strange/random/undefined behavior of bugs in assembly programs is rare. IMO, this is because of reduced count of abstraction layers.
Because allow the programmer to not think (and even know) about some things and leaving them to the layer/libraries.
But every layer adds also a level of obscurity. The interaction between multiply layers is even more undefined and random.
It is OK while everything goes as expected. But when there are problems, the obscurity can make the debugging a hell.
In addition, the behavior of the bugs hidden deep in the layers (or in the way the layers interacts in between and with the application) can be really weird.
That is why, IMHO, the programmer should keep the abstraction layers to the minimal count that allows solving programming tasks with minimal effort, counting not only the coding time, but debugging and supporting time as well.
In my practice, I decided that using FASM with Fresh IDE and set of assembly libraries gives me the needed quality of the code.
For example, I don't know Lisp, so for me it is much harder to read/maintain Lisp project than assembly language project.
And on the Amiga we had DevPac.
And even Windows can use GTK.
Still not GTK though. It is too heavy for assembly language programming and will not allow portability for example on MenuetOS or KolibriOS assembly written OSes.
That's pretty impressive.
It does look like an interesting project though, if you can ignore the fugly widget styles.
Unfortunately it will add another 50..100kB to the code, but the portability has price. :(
Could you instead call into an existing portable UI library? Perhaps FLTK or something more lightweight than the popular ones. It just seems to me that creating a new GUI toolkit from scratch is a massive undertaking and I'm unsure what value you will get over spending the time improving fresh itself? I guess there's some appeal to having a self contained assembly system through and through.
At first, FLTK, does not look much better than the old Windows widgets.
In addition, I strongly want Fresh IDE to be portable to MenuetOS, KolibriOS and other assembly written OSes. As a rule, they all are written with FASM and a good IDE that can be ported for days (not for years) can be great tool for the OS developers.
That is why I started the development of special GUI toolkit.
I don't have much HLL asm/demoscene experience personally so I'm not sure what's "impressive" as engineering feats these days but this looks cool. As someone who aspires to see a viable Smalltalk-like runtime self-modifiable introspective debugger at the OS level with a decent layer of POSIX compatibility and the ability to run AVX512 instructions, I like the idea that tools like this are out there. Cheers, mate
That's an interesting pile of keywords you've got there.
I don't know about Smalltalk (I find Squeak, Pharo, etc utterly incomprehensible - I have no idea what to do with them), but for some time I've been fascinated with the idea of a fundamentally mutable and even self-modifying environment. My favorite optimization would be that, in the case of tight loops with tons of if()s and other types of conditional logic, the language could JIT-_rearrange_ the code to nop the if()s and other logic just before the tight loop was entered - or even better, gather up the parts of code that will be executed and dump all of it somewhere contiguous.
C compilers could probably be made to do this too, but that would break things like W^X and also squarely violate lots of expectations as well.
For a VM, RE: code rearrangement, you're effectively describing dynamic DCE if I understand you correctly, CLR does this (and lots more)[2].
At the low-level programmer level, there's nothing stopping a (weakly) static language like C from adopting that behavior[3] at runtime [i.e. with a completely bit-for-bit identical, statically linked executable which].
At the compiler level, you've got the seminal Turing Award by Ken Thompson that does it at compiler level[4].
At the processor level, you heuristically have branch prediction as a critical part of any pipeline. (I think modern Intel processors as of the Haswell era assign each control flow point a total of 4 bits which just LSL/LSR to count the branch taken/not taken. (Don't quote me on that)).
RE: Smalltalk - for me, the power of the platform's mutability was revealed when I started using Cincom. When I was using GNU implementations ~10 years ago, they felt like toys at the time (though I hear things have largely improved). If you've ever used Ruby, a simple analogy would be the whole "you can (ab)use the hell out of things like #Method_Missing to create your own DSLs". This lends of a lot of flexibility to the language (at the expense of performance, typing guarantees). In a Smalltalk environment, you get that sort of extensibility + static typing guarantees + the dynamic ability to recover from faults in a fashion you want.
Imagine an environment[5] that has that structured instrinsically + the performance of being able to use all them fancy XMM/YMM registers for numerical analysis + a ring0 SoftICE type debugger. Turtles all the way down, baby.
=====
[1] See ISL-TAGE of CBP3 and other, more modern reportings from "Championship Branch Prediction" if it's still being run).
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/8874314 Here's how it's done with the CLR. The JVM is crazy good so I'd imagine the analogue exists there as well.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code
[4] http://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack
[5] Use some micro-kernel OS architecture so process $foo won't alter $critical-driver-talking-to-SATA-devices or modifying malloc. I'd probably co-opt QNXs Neutrino designs since it's tried and true. Plus that sort of architecture has the design benefit of intrinsically safe high-availability integrated into the network stack.
> For a VM, RE: code rearrangement, you're effectively describing dynamic DCE if I understand you correctly, CLR does this (and lots more)[2].
You mean Dynamic Code Evolution?
Regarding [2], branch prediction hinting being unnecessary (as well as statically storing n.length in `for (...; n.length; ...)`) is very neat. I like that. :D
> At the low-level programmer level, there's nothing stopping a (weakly) static language like C from adopting that behavior[3] at runtime [i.e. with a completely bit-for-bit identical, statically linked executable which].
Right. The only problem is people's expectation for C to remain static. Early implementations of such a system may cause glitches due to these expectations being shattered, and result in people a) thinking it won't work or b) thinking the implementation is incompetent. I strongly suspect that the collective masses would probably refuse to use it citing "it's not Rust, it's not safe." Hmph.
> At the compiler level, you've got the seminal Turing Award by Ken Thompson that does it at compiler level[4].
That c2 article very strongly reminded me of https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ - particularly the theoreticalness of the idea.
For example,
> And it is "almost" impossible to detect because TheKenThompsonHack easily propagates into the binaries of all the inspectors, debuggers, disassemblers, and dumpers a programmer would use to try to detect it. And defeats them. Unless you're coding in binary, or you're using tools compiled before the KTH was installed, you simply have no access to an uncompromised tool.
...Nn..n-no, I don't quite think it can actually work in practice like that. What Coding Machines made me realize was that for such an attack to be possible, the hack would need to have local intelligence.
> There are no C compilers out there that don't use yacc and lex. But again, the really frightening thing is via linkers and below this hack can propagate transparently across languages and language generations. In the case of cross compilers it can leap across whole architectures. It may be that the paranoiac rapacity of the hack is the reason KT didn't put any finer point on such implications in his speech ...
Again, with the intelligence thing. The amount of logic needed to be able to dance around like that would be REALLY, REALLY HARD to hide.
Reflections on Trusting Trust didn't provide concrete code to alter /usr/bin/cc or /bin/login, only abstract theory, discussion and philosophy. It would have been interesting to be able to observe how the code was written.
I don't truly think that it's possible to make a program that can truly propagate to an extent that it can traverse hardware and even (in the case of Coding Machines) affect routers, etc.
> At the processor level, you heuristically have branch prediction as a critical part of any pipeline. (I think modern Intel processors as of the Haswell era assign each control flow point a total of 4 bits which just LSL/LSR to count the branch taken/not taken. (Don't quote me on that)).
Oh ok.
> RE: Smalltalk - for me, the power of the platform's mutability was revealed when I started using Cincom.
Okay, I just clicked my way through to get the ISO and MSI (must say the way the site offers the downloads is very nice). Haven't tested whether Wine likes them yet, hopefully it does.
> When I was using GNU implementations ~10 years ago, they felt like toys at the time (though I hear things have largely improved).
Right.
> If you've ever used Ruby, a simple analogy would be the whole "you can (ab)use the hell out of things like #Method_Missing to create your own DSLs".
Ruby is (heh) also on my todo list, but I did recently play with the new JavaScript Proxy object, which basically makes it easy to do things like
var curcfg = null, defcfg = { ... };
var cfg = new Proxy({}, {
get: (_, key) => {
return (curcfg[key] !== null) ? curcfg[key] : defcfg[key];
},
set: (_, key, val) => {
curcfg[key] = val;
return true;
}
});
> This lends of a lot of flexibility to the language (at the expense of performance, typing guarantees).
Mmm. More work for JITs...
> In a Smalltalk environment, you get that sort of extensibility + static typing guarantees + the dynamic ability to recover from faults in a fashion you want.
Very interesting, particularly fault recovery.
> Imagine an environment[5] that has that structured instrinsically + the performance of being able to use all them fancy XMM/YMM registers for numerical analysis + a ring0 SoftICE type debugger. Turtles all the way down, baby.
oooo :)
Okay, okay, I'll be looking at Cincom ST pretty soon, heh.
FWIW, while Smalltalk is a bit over my head (it's mostly the semantic-browser UI, which is specifically what completely throws me), I strongly resonate with a lot of the ideas in it, particularly message passing, which I have some Big Ideas™ I hope to play with at some point. I keep QNX 4.5 and 6.5.0 (the ones with Photon!) running in QEMU and VNC to them when I'm bored.
Oh, also - searching for DCE found me Dynamic Code Evolution, a fork of the HotSpot VM that allows for runtime code re-evaluation - ie, live reload, without JVM restart. If only that were mainstream and open source. It's awesome.
The big problem with using "gcc -S" is that as a result you have a HLL program, simply written as an assembly language listing.
The humans write assembly code very different than HLL. Even translated to asm notation, this difference will persist. Asm programmer will choose different algorithms, different data structures, different architecture of the program.
Actually this is why in the real world tasks, regardless of the great compiler quality, the assembly programmer will always write faster program than HLL programmer.
Another effect is that in most cases, deeply optimized asm program is still more readable and maintainable than deeply optimized HLL program.
In this regard, some early optimizations in assembly programming are acceptable and even good for the code quality.
And yet it looks better than average "modern" website. Fonts are of adequate size, contrast is high, no "carousels", no videos.
Cool stuff.
It is apparently a stack of images. That helps setting the text to follow the couture of the curve.
It lets you define a shape of an image (or other element) that makes it so when it is floated, other elements can wrap up against it correctly.
[1] is an example I just quickly made to show how the linked page could have been done in straight CSS. It works a bit nicer too as the text smoothly wraps instead of stepping like the linked article does (although there is no reason why both methods can't be combined to provide a smooth stepping where possible, and fallback to the approximation they used when it's not supported)
It's browser support is pretty awful right now (only chrome, safari with the `-webkit` prefix, and basic support in firefox behind a flag), but if it makes it to standardization, it's a pretty neat tool to be able to reach for in these cases.
If there were an easier way to see if the website itself was open source, I'd try and give it as a quick patch, but it doesn't look like the website itself is open source anywhere that I can find.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/shape-outsi...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/shape-outsi...
And likely this can be done with SVG as well.
That, and image maps.
https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/ is based on https://2ton.com.au/HeavyThing/, a library written for fasm that handles a bunch of cool things including enough crypto to do TLS and enough network code to make a webserver.
Question. I've just started to become interested in learning/messing around with assembly language under Linux, and fasm seems like a really attractive option - as and nasm are both tied to gcc (nasm indirectly), and fasm skips all that (and produces slightly smaller binaries too!). fasm also seems compiles itself in less than a second on my really old machine as well, and fast iteration time is one of my favorite features.
Linux-specific assembly-language documentation is kind of rare on the ground though; for fasm in particular, there's literally hens' teeth and dust bunnies. It's very possible to piece things together, but if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing it's a bit intimidating.
HeavyThing is practically a tutorial in and of itself, but I must admit my hesitancy to lean too heavily on it due to its use of GPLv3. I certainly respect the use of that license (and understand the many reasons it might be used for such a unique project), but I'm only tinkering around myself at this point so would likely want to use MIT, CC0 or similar, and would feel a bit conflicted about the predominant thing I learned from being from GPLv3.
HT is on the list for sure, but I wanted to combine it with other sources of info. You seem to be one of the few people out there actively using fasm for Linux development, so I figured it couldn't hurt to ask if you had any other high-level suggestions.
I could combine this with viewing gcc's assembly output, as well!
Thanks :D
Edit: This page is ridiculously comprehensive. Wow.
http://chamilo2.grenet.fr/inp/courses/ENSIMAG3MM1LDB/documen... is the official spec for the amd64 calling convention (aka ABI) on unices. http://www.logix.cz/michal/devel/amd64-regs/ is a nice table showing what goes in what register (still amd64) when calling a C library or the kernel. X86 library calling convention is just putting everything on the stack, while the kernel convention.. i don't remember (int 80 and syscall in eax, but arguments..). There's a syscall table https://filippo.io/linux-syscall-table/ and i made a fasm to include https://pastebin.com/nnrMVF8u (amd64; i made from the kernel source headers, that i can't find now).
That's about all there is linux specific.
I've had a look at the examples that come with fasm, which are invaluable.
But I completely forgot to point out (I knew I was forgetting something!) in my previous comment that I'm actually looking for info on 32-bit assembly programming. My motivation comes from the fact that a) a lot of my systems are 32-bit (such as the ThinkPad T43 I'm using to type this), due to circumstances I cannot change; and b) because (as I discovered to my delight) a program written for i386 and statically linked (eg, by fasm's ELF writer) will run on x86_64 without 32-bit glibc/userspace/anything! This makes perfect sense, but is an absolute winner for me for the kinds of things I'm going to want to make.
So x86_64 is in the "it would be monumentally stupid not to learn it" category, and I'm looking forward to doing so, but I'd have to do some seriously inelegant wrangling (something like qemu-x86_64 + 64-bit userspace - on a 32-bit machine, lolol) to actually work with it at this point.
The syscall table you made is very similar to HeavyThing's, heh. I've actually been researching precisely that of late; you most likely generated your copy from https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/entry.... I of course want https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/entry....
C calling convention for x86 is to push everything on the stack (and use call, that is short for "push instruction pointer and jmp", ret being the reverse), while the linux kernel uses a variant of fastcall (aka put stuff in registers (then use int 80)).
When i was learning i found a lot of x86 examples and tutorials (and a book, can't remember the name (is free)), and not much on amd64.
Just play with it, it'l get easy when you go over the wall.
With "normal" C calling convention you have to care about the stack pointer (esp) (i think it's the callee's responsibility (of the called function)), maybe even the bottom pointer (ebp) (i remember the wikipedia page on calling conventions explains it). The other difference between x86 and amd64 is floating point math, where sse is the default on amd64 and x87 on x86 (x87 works on stacks of numbers, the reverse-polish using a stack way IIRC).
Useful tools are: objdump -d ("-M intel" for the intel notation), strace to trace system calls, and fdbg since GDB can't make sense of a valid ELF file. You can also join the flat assembler and/or nasm forums. I like fasm better then nasm for no strong reason, but nasm is a bit easier.
glhf
apples and spice = nice
But some documentation is available in the "Documentation" section of the web site and inside the "Help|Help file" (Ctrl+F1) menu in the IDE itself.
There are small example and template projects as well.
Also the FASM forum is a good place to ask: https://board.flatassembler.net
I've seen some crappy clients expect exact strings though.