Hacker News Reader

Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

At the time I lost my interest to assembly, it had pretty high-level contructs like looping, function frames, structs, etc. via macros. Macros of fasm are iirc recursive, so its power is far more than usual assembler. I would put it at 85% on [regular asm .. non-optimized C] scale. You can think of tasm/masm as of lisp with cpp instead of macros.

The use case beyond educational purpose is still unclear to me though. Especially with macros.

View on HN

Actually the only Assembler I got disappointed with bare macros support is gas.

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?

I liked the MASM 6 macros for some reason. It was blasphemy to others at the time though.

The other MASM macrohead chiming in

I think masm 6.0 was a time when Watcom went popular [or just known to me] and I was very disappointed of my asm skill that lost ~x2 both in time and size for Brezenham's. I couldn't even understand what exactly Watcom did for so wow, much performance, and I gave up finally :(

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 can tell you in my provincial Sweden household, a goddamn PC compatible was near unobtainable until 95. Not that I wanted a PC, I remember I dreamt that I had an Amiga but when I woke up I still had a Z80 machine. :-)

Back in the day, there was a bit of a hierarchy amongst home computer users, with Amiga assembly programmers deriding x86 syntax.

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)

Yeah, looking back I would say Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Basic and AMOS on Amiga were the Unity of the early 90's game dev on home computers.

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.

You always can reduce the usage the of macros or make them more assembly-centric. Check the Fresh IDE sources as an example of moderate macro use.

On the other hand, definition of complex data structures is much easier with powerful macro engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com