4 ms·

Back in the 8/16 bit days, ARM assembly was said to be one of the best features of Acorns — even compared with 68k asm. Maybe it’s finally time to look at this.

• jlarcombe 9y ago
  Yes, although the new instruction set in ARMv8 removes several of the things that made programming in 'classic' ARM assembly such fun on the Acorn, such as the free barrel shifter on most arithmetic ops, conditional execution on all instructions and fast multiple loads/stores with groups of registers. These have gone for various reasons; the fully-flexible barrel shifter is awkward at high frequencies with deep pipelines, the conditional execution flags became a waste of opcode space as branch prediction improved and the load/store multiples required microcode on modern implementations and so increased complexity.