Hacker News Reader

WOW.

Amazing work. Thanks for the exposition.

(I miss the 68000 line. Those were such great chips...)

I miss the assembly. It was so clear and logical, like great engineering should always be. You could browse through it and comprehend at a glance what was happening. By contrast x86 assembly looks like pure rubbish, with stuff that most of the time looks like clever hacks coming from a bad night's sleep, like subtracting a register from itself to get zero... c'mon!

I hate to disappoint you, but the canonical way to clear a 68K address register is `SUBA.L An,An`. My asm-coded replacement for the Metrowerks code resource runtime uses it:

<https://github.com/jjuran/metamage_1/blob/master/mac/toolcha...>

Oops, you're right. I forgot stuff like `MOVE.L #0,Dn` is restricted to data registers. So this must be the way to go, every time a NULL pointer is needed...

Fortunately, sane assembly didn't die with 68k falling out of favor.

MIPS carried the flag, and now RISC-V is even more readable.

The dusk of x86 era is nigh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com