4 ms·

I remember when I was taking an assembly class in college we always joked about how ridiculous it would be to write an OS in assembly. I'm surprised someone act

by moomba 16y ago

I remember when I was taking an assembly class in college we always joked about how ridiculous it would be to write an OS in assembly. I'm surprised someone actually did it. C is so close to assembly that these seems quite unnecessary. Although I do agree with one of the developer's points that Assembly has a kind of beauty about it.

philwelch 16y ago
Back in the day, every OS was written in assembly. Writing Unix in C rather than assembly was actually a controversial innovation at the time.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly and then ported to C. The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths. If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html) C is good.
tekhammer 16y ago
As pointed out, this was normal. My favourite was RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes. The GUI OS would boot (off ROM) quicker than the CRT monitor would take to warm up. And that was 20 years ago.
watmough 16y ago
What about writing a dtp package in arm assembler? My first job, check out: http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm Lol. Looking at those dialogs brings it back. I probably laid most of those suckers out.

by moomba 16y ago

philwelch 16y ago

Back in the day, every OS was written in assembly. Writing Unix in C rather than assembly was actually a controversial innovation at the time.

mahmud 16y ago
Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly and then ported to C. The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths. If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html) C is good.

tekhammer 16y ago

As pointed out, this was normal. My favourite was RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes. The GUI OS would boot (off ROM) quicker than the CRT monitor would take to warm up. And that was 20 years ago.

watmough 16y ago

What about writing a dtp package in arm assembler? My first job, check out: http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm Lol. Looking at those dialogs brings it back. I probably laid most of those suckers out.