Show HN: Emacs minor mode for connecting assembly and assembled code buffers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Emacs minor mode for connecting assembly and assembled code buffers

github.com

128 pointsmeken13 comments

I made a little emacs minor mode for connecting assembly code and assembled code buffers

I'm really fascinated by the idea of demystifying an operating system, so to be able to view the alignment between code and data I find really satisfying

Open articleView on HN

This looks pretty cool. I've always wished for some kind of "2D REPL" experience with assembler, similar to what we can do in Common Lisp. The closest I've gotten to this was experimenting with SIMD intrinsics with SB-SIMD (an SBCL contrib library that provides tons of additional SIMD support to the compiler backend).

One niche use case I see for this minor mode is possibly learning how to program for microcontrollers with so little RAM that you can probably print each byte on a sheet of paper to debug (i.e. 4KiB of RAM or less)

This is cool, but looks like you made it just for you: it only works if the buffer is named "os.asm" and it cd's to a hardcoded path on your harddrive.

This shows what people mean when they say Emacs is easy to extend. I don’t think most popular editors will let you code an extension like this in 167 lines including all boilerplate, comments, and documentation.

This is amazing! I have been using Emacs for development for well over a year and things like this remind me of the incredible power Emacs has to offer.

I’ve always wanted this, amazing!! Thanks for making it.

This is very interesting, as a student, could you make this for vscode?

You should exercise your own programming muscles and extend VSCode for yourself, rather than relying on others to do everything for you.

I think GP is just asking if the author thinks it’s possible. I remember it was hard in the beginning to know - when I would get stuck - if I needed to keep banging my head against it or if I had hit a dead end.

I’m the last person who should carry rocks around in a glass house on HN etiquette: I mouth off too much.

But I’m working on it and I cordially invite you to join me in making an effort to be more productive, especially regarding students, self learners, and other more junior community members trying to get started on ambitious hacking.

You should exercise your own programming muscles and write your own IDE, Operating system , cpu architecture, fabrication process and electricity generation for yourself, rather than relying on others to do everything for you.

It's possible. But as the other commenter says, it'd likely be much more effort than it is in emacs just because of how the model the editors are built on differ.

You can definitely accomplish something like this in VSCode and I would strongly encourage any student to explore customizing their own tools and workflow.

The main difference is that VSCode “extensions” (which in most respects are very much like emacs modes) are usually written in TypeScript rather than elisp. In fact there’s a guy called Steve Yegge who has blogged a bunch about an effort to make it possible to extend Emacs with JavaScript, so there’s lots of precedent for the analogy.

If you decide you want to do this and need help getting started feel free to email me.

As a student, you'd be well-served to explore the various power tools people have used for many decades, with emacs being at the top of that list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com