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Comment by b33j0r | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like this, how is Nasm news? Fine. I have not done enough assembly lately, fair enough.

More seriously, is anyone still doing this outside of edge computing and embedded applications? Or… a hobby?

I had to use a bit of assembly recently and chose nasm for it. A client had an older piece of compiled code and wanted to be able to use it on a modern machine. It was written in a propriety language and compiled for a 32bit system. The argument passing conventions used by the compiler were unusual. So I wrote a bit of assembly in nasm to create a stub function callable from C, it was really just moving things into the right registers and some bits to the stack. So nothing really being done in the asm. The hard part was figuring out the calling convention.

Edit: Looking back it turns out that "recently" was 18 months ago.

I'm starting to learn reverse engineering and while doing that I have had to read a bunch of assembly but also write a small amount too. I don't use NASM and am only writing a few instructions at a time, mainly either updating an existing instruction or replacing an instruction with one or more that are the same size

Nasm was news at a time when it would make sense to call an open source project the netwide something.

For this I just remind myself that every year there are people younger than me who are getting their start in these topics and this is their first time hearing about nasm. That's ok.

At my job we use nasm to assemble the x86 entry points for our OS kernel. Any assembler would do the job - someone before me just happened to pick nasm.

I use Nasm to learn assembly, so I can reverse engineer disassembled programs.

You'll see OS kernel developers use it, but those projects are often for educational or recreational purposes.

And it's not news it's 25 years old.

Only as a part of learning OS kernel development, which is another hobby. We mobile app developers practically have no use of assembly code.

People have to develop for computers without an OS. They get paid to do it.

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