Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiberium | Hacker News Reader

To anyone who's interested in such projects: also check MenuetOS and KolibriOS (which is a fork of Menuet that diverged a looong time ago). MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is closed source.

View on HN

I am interested in learning assembly language. I searched in Coursera but didn't find anything suitable for a total beginner (I have experience in Java and am doing some C/C++ courses to get closer to metal).

This might interest you: Writing a C Compiler by Nora Sandler (No Starch Press). You create a working C compiler that outputs x64 assembly language in the first chapter (as long as the program only returns an integer from main) and then you keep adding features one by one for the rest of the book. You can write the compiler in any language you like (I’m using Python) and you only write the compiler while using your system’s precompiler (the step that handles #include and #define etc and removes comments), linker, and assembler. You just read preprocessed C as text and output assembly as text.

The thing that makes it relevant for learning assembly is that’s what you’re outputting so you’ll be learning that as well as what’s going on with the stack when calling and returning from functions and using local variables and basically everything that corresponds to C. (I’m only on chapter 2.)

Some other reasons it might work out for you is that you are getting into C as well already, and you have a familiar language you could use for the compiler if you wanted: java (assuming it doesn’t take too long to compile and run a java program repeatedly)

>precompiler

s/precompiler/preprocessor/g

, i guess.

Oops. Yes, you're correct.

I highly recomment this NASM tutorial for an introduction to x86-64 https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/

Check out assembly language books by Randall Hyde and Paul Carter, two authors of two different books on the topic.

Search for:

The Art of Assembly Language by Randall Hyde

Carter book:

http://pacman128.github.io/pcasm/

CodeAcademy: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/computer-architecture-assem...

MIT open courseware: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-004-computation-structures-spr...

> MenuetOS also has a x64 version with SMP which is closed source.

What's the point of making something like that closed source in 2025?

Would anybody actually use such a thing except for as a hobby OS, on a multi-core X64 machine no less?

It's available for download for free, if that's the concern.

I really doubt that this is the concern.

also TempleOS if you'd prefer something more insane

I was coming to the comments to write this reminds me of Terry Davis, may be rest in peace. It might sound strange but Terry provided me with inspiration and a reminder that anything can be created or “Willed into existence”.

fun fact, last year I had a contractor come to my house. He was a very nice guy. After he was done we were talking and it turned out he was terry’s brother… He told me a lot of stories about him and his life, mental health and death. Pretty sad and interesting..

Amazing, if you would at all be interested in sharing any I am all ears.

Just out of curiosity, how did that get brought up?

Given an infinite multitude of parallel universes, perhaps one exists where TempleOS was in fact the sole and exclusive conduit to divinity and Terry was it's prophet. I hope that is the case.

This instance was that timeline.

Well yes and in that timeline and shall we say warped logic, Terry stated that the random number generator is the direct connection to god in his TempleOS.

Holy C, no less

Holy C is hard to code without crashing Adam. If you type the wrong kind of indirection, the whole OS freezes.

Yes there was no memory protection or anything. All ring 0!

I watched a few Terry's streams and TempleOS seems to be something pretty fluid to use. You literally navigate in the console, or whatever it is called, and can open any file the current cursor points to.

It even has games

This is the best rabbit hole I’ve gone down in awesome. Thanks for sharing!

ZealOS is TempleOS but with support for some modern functionality, however this detracts from the proper TempleOS experience

Be careful, you don't want to start a religious war about ZealOS' use of 32-bit colour.

I mean, look at the East-West schism. The stated reasons for the split are just as stupid.

That's a rather odd take. The ecclesiastical differences alone are irreconcilable, not to mention the theological disputes.

They worked together for a thousand years. Ecclesiastically, the only problem is everybody's refusal to share power again.

It's not like someone had a bad day and the other side isn't over it. The schism of 1054 was centuries in the making, and even at the time it was largely not in any way impacting lives of average Christians. In the centuries that followed, there were brief periods of reconciliation and further rises in tension.

The sacking of Constantinople in 1204 and its later fall a few decades later made reconciliation far harder, and the ultimate shift of power to Moscow made it practically impossible. The final separation of the churches was formalized in the 1700s.

In all the intervening years, the Roman Catholic Church has doubled down on Papal supremacy and infallibility, something that is anathema to Orthodoxy. Beyond that, centuries of diverging traditions have further entrenched theological differences.

There really isn't any separating the ecclesiastical and theological differences at this point. Even the Protestants, who at first largely opposed the Pope rather than the Roman Catholic Church itself, sought to unify with the Orthodox Church in Moscow and found it to be too different to their liking.

This is the kind of quality comment I've come to expect from HackerNews! Well done.

I'm a cradle-Catholic-turned-Atheist, and I still find all of early church history fascinating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com