12 ms·

A forum engine written in Assembly

175 points by utf_8x 3y ago

flumpcakes 3y ago
This is amazingly fast to my eyes. I am endlessly annoyed by slow interfaces. At $DAYJOB I have to use a web and desktop GUI for managing CheckPoint firewalls. These often will freeze for dozens of seconds, and generally make my computer crawl. I feel that this should not be acceptable in 2023.
- eterps 3y ago
  The D forum is also quite fast: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/
  - hxii 3y ago
    Reminds me of bbPress, at least visually.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I am endlessly annoyed by slow interfaces. At $DAYJOB I have to use a web and desktop GUI for managing CheckPoint firewalls. These often will freeze for dozens of seconds, and generally make my computer crawl. I feel that this should not be acceptable in 2023. This is probably not a problem of the principal slowness of the software. With a high likelihood (source: personal programming experience of my colleagues and me), the root cause when the GUI freezes in such situation is typically rather that some operation that needs a little bit of time (say, a server request) is done in the GUI thread, thus blocking the processing of any other event (message). Windows programming is very sensitive in this regard.
  - fredrikholm 3y ago
    > and generally make my computer crawl. Sounds like its worse than that.
- briHass 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I really like the Mikrotik network gear, because of the Winbox application for management. It's Windows Forms (GDI) in the MDI style of most Windows apps of circa 2000. Lightning fast, responsive, and with nice touches like being able to drag files on/off the interface to upload/download and the ability to copy/paste entries like they were lines in a text file. I know why the web for UI took over, but I sure do miss Windows forms-based applications. The web is fine for the UI to a bank or some other tool you don't interact with that often, but for tools where you can spend hours working inside, browser-based interfaces are terrible.
  - theamk 3y ago
    Also unusable by many people - I see mostly macbooks around me, with some Linux laptops or Chromebooks. Windows is for those super-low-privileged users who cannot be trusted with their own system and need IT to manage them; or for gamers. And yes, I can probably run the management software in wine, but I will avoid it if I can.
    - briHass 3y ago
      They recommend and 'support' running it in Wine. I haven't tried, but I'm sure it works fine given Wine tends to work best with no frills Win apps from a decade ago.
alberth 3y ago
It makes me happy to see people still build stuff like this. Also interesting that they host their code on Fossil, which itself has a builtin forum engine written in C. https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki
mhd 3y ago
I looked into maybe using this a few months ago, but decided against it. https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#16249 https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#1624...
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Thanks for posting. In the .Net world we had the whole Moq library drama recently. Now I check the social media of library creators before I use the library. I'm sorry but I cannot trust deranged people's code in production systems.
- 10000truths 3y ago
  What the hell are those god-awful notifications that keep spamming the bottom right corner of the page? I can't seem to turn them off.
  - mcint 3y ago
    There's a bell icon in the header, it toggles the real-time notifications. Took me a minute to find it too.
    - StingyJelly 3y ago
      I went straight to ublock element picker without thinking about it board.asm32.info##div.info.toast
  - xigency 3y ago
    Would be fine if they didn’t cover the content on the page, but maybe that’s a mobile problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- YeBanKo 3y ago
  I just checkout out the chat functionality and the first thing I saw there was a a bunch of obscene racists messages in Russian.
sctb 3y ago
The flat assembler (which assembles this project) is worth checking out if you haven't already: https://flatassembler.net https://flatassembler.net. I first played around with it almost 20 years ago and it was noticeably more ergonomic and productive than masm, nasm, to say nothing of gas. I imagine it was designed for human programmers rather than primarily compiler front ends, so it's a popular choice for hand-written assembly projects.
- msla 3y ago
  I'm not seeing a lot of difference between flat assembler code and NASM code. What in specific makes flat assembler better than NASM?
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    I wouldn't personally say it's better, so I can't speak for OP; but generally people that use FASM prefer it for two reasons: 1) it's self-compilable (vs NASM, which is C) and 2) they like its macro system.
- anta40 3y ago
  Unfortunately FASM is written in 32bit assembly, which means it won't run on recent macOS versions. Not an issue for NASM, since it's written in C.
jbm 3y ago
I don't understand — isn't the speed mostly limited by network or disk access? Is there a significant improvement by having the underlying code in Assembly? A very cool application regardless, I haven't seen Assembly since college now.
- alberth 3y ago
  The website being only 65kb in total size, all inlined with no additional downloads, plays a massive role in its performance no doubt. Regardless of what language is serving up the request. Still neat though.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That means it fits in cache in its entirety. I've found this often to be the biggest factor: reduce the size of the 'hot' set so it fits in cache and you can see crazy speed improvements.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    if cpu is the bottleneck, then sure, if it's network/db then it won't make much of a difference at all.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That depends. If you do more complex stuff you can easily be CPU bound, but if you're just pumping data then likely the network will be your first limit. Caching should take care of the disk as a limitation (besides that, SSDs are wicked fast).
  - chefandy 3y ago
    What computationally complex operation would a forum application regularly do? I can't think of any but I've never written a forum application.
jacquesm 3y ago
Imagine what you could do with a smartphone if it were programmed entirely in assembly.
- simulosius 3y ago
  Why would anyone want to program a smartphone entirely in assembly? There is a reason (well actually there are many) that the vast majority of software development these days is done using more advanced languages.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Cost. Convenience. In that order.
    - simulosius 3y ago
      Cost? Please explain why writing programs in assembly is supposed to be *cheaper* than writing programs in a higher level language? The same goes for convenience: Since when is writing an application in assemlby more convenient than writing an application in a modern language?
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        No, it is more expensive. And less convenient. For some reason you interpreted both of these the wrong way around. I wasn't answering the question, I was giving examples of those reasons. Which are pretty obvious.
        simulosius 3y ago
        Ah sorry, my bad! Makes a lot more sense this way ;-)
        jacquesm 3y ago
        It certainly does :) I should have quoted that bit though to make it clearer.
mcint 3y ago
Real-time notifications give a sense of activity, nice for building a community. Reminds me of http://listen.hatnote.com/ http://listen.hatnote.com/ showing live wikipedia edits, but more integrated. Some anonymity, or mention of a group, e.g. anonymous users, forum member, admin, would be better. Too much and too specific sharing of activity makes this feel stifling--more like chat with read notifications, less like email or forum where people take time to compose replies.
skilled 3y ago
All I want for Christmas is the old-school :lol: emoji from phpBB days…
- deaddodo 3y ago
  They still exist and are easily installable on current phpBB instances: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13 https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13
Jyaif 3y ago
Very fast! Or should I say, the normal speed at which websites should operate. x86 only.
Chiba-City 3y ago
Garbage collecting interpreters are (mostly) for wimpy scripting kiddies. The obvious historically documented exceptions are the "Symbolic AI Researchers." In 1990, SQL (and dBASE and Excel) was a "computer language" for secretaries. Now in 2023, we suffer uneducated halfwits manically typing in endless repugnant "ad tech" and "SEO" with our "Bioinformatics Researcher" hacks inflicting delusions based on Excel #Err cells (look it up) upon an unwitting populace. Somewhere, we went wrong. We have GREAT and WISE Software Engineering (Prescriptive and Historical) guidance available in the public domain now. Our mercenary "job hoppers) don't seem to be interested in accessing that. Going forward, some combination of ASM and Forth in Open Source incarnations and with type-checking hints will wring the most computation out of energy resources (CPU cycles).
- kaba0 3y ago
  That’s a thoroughly uninformed take, and this stance is overly elitist for no good reason.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  All I can say is good luck with that philosophy in anything other than writing drivers or small embedded systems.
Waterluvian 3y ago
Got me thinking. How easy is it to write Assembly that looks good but is slower than C? Like can you be really good with Assembly and still not be certain your effort is actually worth not doing it in a higher language?
- hoten 3y ago
  Trivially easy. Just try to beat a C compilers optimization for constant integer division. https://clang.godbolt.org/z/MrMxo678x https://clang.godbolt.org/z/MrMxo678x
  - tekknolagi 3y ago
    Add -O2 for even fewer instructions :)
    - hoten 3y ago
      Thanks, that was a silly oversight. Your comment is appreciated, as it saved an instruction in my game engine's JIT compilation :) https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZQuestClassic/commit/0a780d638671e91372675c2161cc0fa0131545b8 https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZQuestClassic/commit/0a78...
      - tekknolagi 3y ago
        Cool!!
  - okaleniuk 3y ago
    Have you tried measuring the actual impact of this? This optimization is so old, I'm not even sure if it's still worth the effort. It definitely worked in the 90s. What you do here is you save on division, and lose on instruction cache. This might look good on a benchmark when all your code fits the cache nicely, but bite back in-vivo. You should try it out in an actual problem and see how it goes.
    - 3y ago
kmoser 3y ago
Not exactly a forum as we now know it, but I believe Bill Basham's Diversi-Dial (DDial) BBS software for the Apple II was written entirely in assembly. https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-party-line/ https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-...
fortyseven 3y ago
Nah: https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#16249 https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#1624...
- sodimel 3y ago
  Ouch, I wasn't prepared to read this post.
  - chickenplusone 3y ago
    [flagged]
- fortyseven 3y ago
  (Oops, somehow I missed the existing discussion thread on this further down. Sorry for the repetition.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
GaNuongLaChanh 3y ago
Fantastic forum engine, the demo is https://board.asm32.info/ https://board.asm32.info/ and beautiful themes are at https://asmbb.org https://asmbb.org

175 points by utf_8x 3y ago

This is amazingly fast to my eyes. I am endlessly annoyed by slow interfaces. At $DAYJOB I have to use a web and desktop GUI for managing CheckPoint firewalls. These often will freeze for dozens of seconds, and generally make my computer crawl. I feel that this should not be acceptable in 2023.

eterps 3y ago
The D forum is also quite fast: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/
- hxii 3y ago
  Reminds me of bbPress, at least visually.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I am endlessly annoyed by slow interfaces. At $DAYJOB I have to use a web and desktop GUI for managing CheckPoint firewalls. These often will freeze for dozens of seconds, and generally make my computer crawl. I feel that this should not be acceptable in 2023. This is probably not a problem of the principal slowness of the software. With a high likelihood (source: personal programming experience of my colleagues and me), the root cause when the GUI freezes in such situation is typically rather that some operation that needs a little bit of time (say, a server request) is done in the GUI thread, thus blocking the processing of any other event (message). Windows programming is very sensitive in this regard.
- fredrikholm 3y ago
  > and generally make my computer crawl. Sounds like its worse than that.
briHass 3y ago
This is one of the reasons I really like the Mikrotik network gear, because of the Winbox application for management. It's Windows Forms (GDI) in the MDI style of most Windows apps of circa 2000. Lightning fast, responsive, and with nice touches like being able to drag files on/off the interface to upload/download and the ability to copy/paste entries like they were lines in a text file. I know why the web for UI took over, but I sure do miss Windows forms-based applications. The web is fine for the UI to a bank or some other tool you don't interact with that often, but for tools where you can spend hours working inside, browser-based interfaces are terrible.
- theamk 3y ago
  Also unusable by many people - I see mostly macbooks around me, with some Linux laptops or Chromebooks. Windows is for those super-low-privileged users who cannot be trusted with their own system and need IT to manage them; or for gamers. And yes, I can probably run the management software in wine, but I will avoid it if I can.
  - briHass 3y ago
    They recommend and 'support' running it in Wine. I haven't tried, but I'm sure it works fine given Wine tends to work best with no frills Win apps from a decade ago.

alberth 3y ago

It makes me happy to see people still build stuff like this. Also interesting that they host their code on Fossil, which itself has a builtin forum engine written in C. https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki

mhd 3y ago

I looked into maybe using this a few months ago, but decided against it. https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#16249 https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#1624...

0xDEF 3y ago
Thanks for posting. In the .Net world we had the whole Moq library drama recently. Now I check the social media of library creators before I use the library. I'm sorry but I cannot trust deranged people's code in production systems.
10000truths 3y ago
What the hell are those god-awful notifications that keep spamming the bottom right corner of the page? I can't seem to turn them off.
- mcint 3y ago
  There's a bell icon in the header, it toggles the real-time notifications. Took me a minute to find it too.
  - StingyJelly 3y ago
    I went straight to ublock element picker without thinking about it board.asm32.info##div.info.toast
- xigency 3y ago
  Would be fine if they didn’t cover the content on the page, but maybe that’s a mobile problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
YeBanKo 3y ago
I just checkout out the chat functionality and the first thing I saw there was a a bunch of obscene racists messages in Russian.

sctb 3y ago

The flat assembler (which assembles this project) is worth checking out if you haven't already: https://flatassembler.net https://flatassembler.net. I first played around with it almost 20 years ago and it was noticeably more ergonomic and productive than masm, nasm, to say nothing of gas. I imagine it was designed for human programmers rather than primarily compiler front ends, so it's a popular choice for hand-written assembly projects.

msla 3y ago
I'm not seeing a lot of difference between flat assembler code and NASM code. What in specific makes flat assembler better than NASM?
- deaddodo 3y ago
  I wouldn't personally say it's better, so I can't speak for OP; but generally people that use FASM prefer it for two reasons: 1) it's self-compilable (vs NASM, which is C) and 2) they like its macro system.
anta40 3y ago
Unfortunately FASM is written in 32bit assembly, which means it won't run on recent macOS versions. Not an issue for NASM, since it's written in C.

jbm 3y ago

I don't understand — isn't the speed mostly limited by network or disk access? Is there a significant improvement by having the underlying code in Assembly? A very cool application regardless, I haven't seen Assembly since college now.

alberth 3y ago
The website being only 65kb in total size, all inlined with no additional downloads, plays a massive role in its performance no doubt. Regardless of what language is serving up the request. Still neat though.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That means it fits in cache in its entirety. I've found this often to be the biggest factor: reduce the size of the 'hot' set so it fits in cache and you can see crazy speed improvements.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  if cpu is the bottleneck, then sure, if it's network/db then it won't make much of a difference at all.
jacquesm 3y ago
That depends. If you do more complex stuff you can easily be CPU bound, but if you're just pumping data then likely the network will be your first limit. Caching should take care of the disk as a limitation (besides that, SSDs are wicked fast).
- chefandy 3y ago
  What computationally complex operation would a forum application regularly do? I can't think of any but I've never written a forum application.

jacquesm 3y ago

Imagine what you could do with a smartphone if it were programmed entirely in assembly.

simulosius 3y ago
Why would anyone want to program a smartphone entirely in assembly? There is a reason (well actually there are many) that the vast majority of software development these days is done using more advanced languages.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Cost. Convenience. In that order.
  - simulosius 3y ago
    Cost? Please explain why writing programs in assembly is supposed to be *cheaper* than writing programs in a higher level language? The same goes for convenience: Since when is writing an application in assemlby more convenient than writing an application in a modern language?
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      No, it is more expensive. And less convenient. For some reason you interpreted both of these the wrong way around. I wasn't answering the question, I was giving examples of those reasons. Which are pretty obvious.
      - simulosius 3y ago
        Ah sorry, my bad! Makes a lot more sense this way ;-)
        jacquesm 3y ago
        It certainly does :) I should have quoted that bit though to make it clearer.

mcint 3y ago

Real-time notifications give a sense of activity, nice for building a community. Reminds me of http://listen.hatnote.com/ http://listen.hatnote.com/ showing live wikipedia edits, but more integrated. Some anonymity, or mention of a group, e.g. anonymous users, forum member, admin, would be better. Too much and too specific sharing of activity makes this feel stifling--more like chat with read notifications, less like email or forum where people take time to compose replies.

skilled 3y ago

All I want for Christmas is the old-school :lol: emoji from phpBB days…

deaddodo 3y ago
They still exist and are easily installable on current phpBB instances: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13 https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13

Jyaif 3y ago

Very fast! Or should I say, the normal speed at which websites should operate. x86 only.

Chiba-City 3y ago

Garbage collecting interpreters are (mostly) for wimpy scripting kiddies. The obvious historically documented exceptions are the "Symbolic AI Researchers." In 1990, SQL (and dBASE and Excel) was a "computer language" for secretaries. Now in 2023, we suffer uneducated halfwits manically typing in endless repugnant "ad tech" and "SEO" with our "Bioinformatics Researcher" hacks inflicting delusions based on Excel #Err cells (look it up) upon an unwitting populace. Somewhere, we went wrong. We have GREAT and WISE Software Engineering (Prescriptive and Historical) guidance available in the public domain now. Our mercenary "job hoppers) don't seem to be interested in accessing that. Going forward, some combination of ASM and Forth in Open Source incarnations and with type-checking hints will wring the most computation out of energy resources (CPU cycles).

kaba0 3y ago
That’s a thoroughly uninformed take, and this stance is overly elitist for no good reason.
lost_tourist 3y ago
All I can say is good luck with that philosophy in anything other than writing drivers or small embedded systems.

Waterluvian 3y ago

Got me thinking. How easy is it to write Assembly that looks good but is slower than C? Like can you be really good with Assembly and still not be certain your effort is actually worth not doing it in a higher language?

hoten 3y ago
Trivially easy. Just try to beat a C compilers optimization for constant integer division. https://clang.godbolt.org/z/MrMxo678x https://clang.godbolt.org/z/MrMxo678x
- tekknolagi 3y ago
  Add -O2 for even fewer instructions :)
  - hoten 3y ago
    Thanks, that was a silly oversight. Your comment is appreciated, as it saved an instruction in my game engine's JIT compilation :) https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZQuestClassic/commit/0a780d638671e91372675c2161cc0fa0131545b8 https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZQuestClassic/commit/0a78...
    - tekknolagi 3y ago
      Cool!!
- okaleniuk 3y ago
  Have you tried measuring the actual impact of this? This optimization is so old, I'm not even sure if it's still worth the effort. It definitely worked in the 90s. What you do here is you save on division, and lose on instruction cache. This might look good on a benchmark when all your code fits the cache nicely, but bite back in-vivo. You should try it out in an actual problem and see how it goes.
  - 3y ago

kmoser 3y ago

Not exactly a forum as we now know it, but I believe Bill Basham's Diversi-Dial (DDial) BBS software for the Apple II was written entirely in assembly. https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-party-line/ https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-...

fortyseven 3y ago

Nah: https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#16249 https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#1624...

sodimel 3y ago
Ouch, I wasn't prepared to read this post.
- chickenplusone 3y ago
  [flagged]
fortyseven 3y ago
(Oops, somehow I missed the existing discussion thread on this further down. Sorry for the repetition.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

GaNuongLaChanh 3y ago

Fantastic forum engine, the demo is https://board.asm32.info/ https://board.asm32.info/ and beautiful themes are at https://asmbb.org https://asmbb.org