3 ms·
there's something incredibly comfortable about being able to view the instruction set along with affected flags and supported address modes in its entirety on s
by gfody 6y ago
there's something incredibly comfortable about being able to view the instruction set along with affected flags and supported address modes in its entirety on something about the size of an index card
- caslon 6y agoThe elegance of that time is something unfortunately missing from modern software.
- the_only_law 6y agoI don't even know hoe x86 experts got there. I'm constantly learning about all sorts of strange instruction that look like random strings and perform seemingly odd calculations.
- caslon 6y agoIntel has kept their ISAs roughly-consistent with each other since 1972. Of course, in doing this, they have created a behemoth. You can't make something smaller when your goal is eternal (in)consistency.
- zozbot234 6y agoRISC-V has its own ISA summary card, AIUI. Plot twist: there are no address modes (since it's a load-store architecture, all loads and stores are explicit) and no flags to keep track of (since compare-and-branch instructions are used instead of flags, to make higher-performance implementations easier).
- zimpenfish 6y agoYou could probably get the entire (original, ARM1-3ish) ARM instruction set onto an index card with a little creative freedom. Possibly even a single side? edit: Forgot to explicitly clarify that it was ARM