Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened.
We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse.
Happy to answer any questions :)
If you want to check out some fun assembly code in a larger program, I suggest checking out the leaked furby source code. [1] The assembly for the lunar landing modules from the 1960s is also pretty wild [2]
And... OH MY GOD FURBY SOURCECODE THIS IS AWESOME THANK YOU
Those things were pretty crazy when they glitched out, my friend had one which would get thrown in into a loop where it just open and close its eyes looking from side to side going WEAOWEAOWEAOWEAO like some kind of possessed demon until you took the batteries out.
Oh yeah, obligatory picture of what I'm pretty sure is Margaret Hamilton standing next to a printout of that lunar lander code [1]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/ma...
I was under the impression that this is the primary memorable feature of Furbies.
The second one is the Furby Organ, of course: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o
I really cut my teeth on programming getting yelled at a lot by a guy in German about meeting OpenBSD kodequalität and that kind of sucked, to be honest I was at a point one time after enough workplace toxicity in IT (Getting sexually harassed by a boss at a megacorp guaranteed I don't ever want to work at one of those places again especially) where I figured I'd rather be a bee farmer or something instead. There's really no necessity for that kind of attitude but some people have been going around acting like this is the way things are in IT so you better suck it up and get used to it, especially when there's a lot of money on the line, and it's definitely true that a LOT of people could learn better on how to write code that doesn't get hacked or crashes, because often there isn't just tons of money on the line but people's health, safety, and wellness - but if the health, safety and wellness of the person writing the code is affected by some insanely stupid cultural assumption that's existed in this industry, then how good are they ultimately going to be at it in their code? It was kind of funny watching Linus Torvalds explode at people for these things back in the day, but in hindsight I'm very glad he took some time off to become a more emotionally and socially mature person for the good of the project. I don't want to work in an industry where it's just smelly angry brogrammers with maturity issues, the more that changes the better and I think I see it happening quite rapidly.
What these kids are doing is a huge step in the right direction, I applaud them. They seem to get what the past half century or so of people seem to have been kind of embarrassingly bad at and that's just being decent human beings with each other.
It's ironic that you say this while complaining about bad attitudes in the OpenBSD community. When it comes to obnoxious attitudes, Linus Torvalds is a nobody compared to Theo de Raadt. BTW, Linus is now pushing for gradual adoption of Rust in the kernel, which would turn many issues of "writing code that doesn't crash" (though not all) into things that a compiler can check for you. That community is generally pretty relaxed and cooperative towards newcomers, due to a shared understanding that there's no point getting angry about code that won't even pass that check.
I like the Redox crowd and other people who are trying their hand at pure rust kernel+userland as well, they are doing some very interesting things that probably should have been done a long time ago - it's just not exactly easy to move on from C/C++ heterodoxy when it's such a complex thing to even fathom entirely replacing. Like when your whole kernel is in a different ABI you need to replace the whole userland, too... Not exactly small potatoes. Very admirable to just go ahead and do it.
what happens when a member hits 20?