3 ms·

"Microsoft Macro Assembler, a product I grew to hate with a passion." Turbo Assembler FTW :)

• lallysingh 2y ago
  MASM was always horrible. nasm has been lovely, but I haven't used in 10+ years. https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm
  • 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
    Why all this MASM hate? I barely ever used it, but I noticed that MASM 5.1 is included (together with MSC 5.1 and various other Microsoft tools from 1988) in Microsoft's MIT-licensed MS-DOS repo. Trying some hello world level examples there was nothing obviously annoying about it so far. https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS
    • lallysingh 2y ago
      The macros! Wtf were they doing with the macros! They didn't want to have a normal assembler that kept people writing maintainable assembly code. They just had macro stacked on macros (my memory here is literally 30 years old, I had to write windows 3.1 vxd drivers) and it didn't help, because they had to use the same registers you were using to do their work. An obtrusive non-abstraction that made life painful.