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HelloAssembly: The smallest possible complete Windows application (2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY
- taf2 2mo agolove this and it's timely as I think with AI more of my code will just be native assembly for example: https://github.com/taf2/tic-tac-toe https://github.com/taf2/tic-tac-toe my m series native assembly based tic tac toe windowed game... very portable too you just simply execute codex --yolo port my app to x y z host...
- eggy 2mo agoI haven't played with yolo yet. I'll have to use my airgapped, old Lenovo ThinkPad for this! Whenever I see yolo, I can't stop thinking of Joseph Redmon's YOLO and his astounding resume format!
- eggy 2mo agoI should try FASM to see if it produces a smaller size exe. COM files are small, but 16-bit DOS was the thing back in the day - 100H yeah and basically a memory dump.
- Bluestein 2mo ago> 100H yeah and basically a memory dump ... the days! :)
- WillAdams 2mo agoFor more of the same (though I wish source was available) which actually does something useful, see the various small utilities at https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
- Bluestein 2mo agoShields Up!
- drdexebtjl 2mo ago[flagged]
- rvz 2mo agoDo you have any evidence of these (unsubstantiated) claims against him?
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoEdited with previous threads linking court documents.
- TiredOfLife 2mo agoHe also lied about his contributions to Start menu
- JoeDaDude 2mo agoWhat about his contributions to human civilization? ;) He got a world record score on the Tempest arcade game [1], then developed an AI which beat his own record[2]. His biggest failure was, that after rebuilding TEMPEST from arcade machine ROMS, he added levels to the game but never made them public [3]. [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuSMCWu02hA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuSMCWu02hA [2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdbpoDjIvPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdbpoDjIvPk [3]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjsVSEbXDOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjsVSEbXDOM
- skinfaxi 2mo agoMy how the overton window has moved. Some of violative conduct is standard practice now. > When consumers prepared to purchase a product, additional services and products including a $9.95 back-up disc and $4.95 ‘optional extended service’ plan appeared on the check-out form. The form also listed “one free year of updates” – selected by default – but the company was then authorized to automatically charge a consumer’s credit card at the end of the year unless the buyer cancels the update plan.
- 2mo ago
- delta_p_delta_x 2mo agoInteresting to bypass CRT and work directly against the Windows API. That said, these rely on USER.32.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL to do the majority of the heavy lifting. It's a bit like 'smallest hello world in assembly' but the code is just setting up the calling convention and then passing the zero-terminated character string into `write`. Cool, but that could be done a bit more straightforwardly in C, too. A lot of assembly (including in the linked repository) is book-keeping for the platform's calling convention.
- munchler 2mo agoIt’s a minimal Windows app, so the whole idea is to rely on Windows DLLs as much as possible.
- actionfromafar 2mo agoOfficially, one should not use KERNEL32.dll for instance but go via crt. In practice, most interfaces are stable.
- neonz80 2mo agokernel32 is an official API, you're probably thinking of ntdll. CRT is the C-runtime. Not everything is written in C.
- actionfromafar 2mo agoYes, you are right, must have been thinking of ntdll.
- delta_p_delta_x 2mo agoKERNEL32.DLL (in spite of the name) provides user-mode system services for the Windows API. The CRT provides the C99 API. There are many entry points to the same thing on Windows; you can do any of `malloc`/`HeapAlloc`/`new`/`VirtualAlloc` to get a void* memory buffer. `malloc` is from the CRT; `HeapAlloc` is from KERNEL32.DLL, and `new` is from the C++ runtime.
- haunter 2mo agoMeanwhile in the Unix world you can go as low as 45 bytes https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...
- Bluestein 2mo agoGoodness gracious me.-
- p00dles 2mo agoI hope that expression makes a comeback.
- Bluestein 2mo agoYou know? FOR ONE expression our current neuralese-spewing friends could standarize on - I'd not mind this one (and the ilk) becoming "load-bearing", again.- PS. Honest take :)
- wolfi1 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodness_Gracious_Me_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodness_Gracious_Me_(song)
- Someone 2mo agoUnfair comparison. The Windows tool (FTA): “Runs a Windows message loop Has a title bar, minimize, maximize, and close buttons, which all work as expected Has a system menu with the same Paints the background and some text centered in the middle, equal to or larger than "Dave's Tiny App"” That Linux program: “Let’s take an incredibly simple program, one that does nothing but return a number back to the operating system” See https://archive.is/w01DO#selection-265.0-265.44 https://archive.is/w01DO#selection-265.0-265.44 for a fairer comparison (97/133 bytes)
- WalterGR 2mo ago97 bytes for Windows at the time this very nice walkthrough was written: http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype/ http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype/
- ggerules 2mo agoWindows and assembly is a fun topic! Putting the search terms "Windows" and "assembly language" turns up all sort of books. The one that got me to initially explore the topic (from 1993).... [0] For a more up to date treatment of assembly and windows.... comes with source code for the IDE also. Ray Seyfarth's book [1]. [0] Windows Assembly Language & Systems Programming: Object Oriented & Low-Level Systems Programming in Assembly Language for Windows 3.X [1] Introduction to 64 Bit Windows Assembly Language Programming: Fourth Edition ISBN-13: 978-1543138849, ISBN-10: 1543138845
- hnea3ekp5i 2mo agoAppreciate you writing it up
- abcd_f 2mo agoThe smallest meaningful program for MS-DOS was exactly 2 bytes: FA F4 That's CLI HLT, which effectively deadlocked the machine. Had to be saved as a .com fule obviously, not as an .exe.
- smokel 2mo agoSomewhat more meaningful was "INT 19h" (CD 19), which also took 2 bytes and started the boot loader, bypassing the slow boot sequence of most systems. And wouldn't a single instruction such as NOP or HLT be simply 1 byte?
- AdieuToLogic 2mo ago>> The smallest meaningful program for MS-DOS was exactly 2 bytes ... > Somewhat more meaningful was "INT 19h" (CD 19) ... I seem to remember the smallest MS-DOS program to be CD 20h saved as a `.com`.
- abcd_f 2mo agoYeah, but the first one does nothing at all and the second does nothing for a bit :)
- rfgplk 2mo ago"smallest possible" is exactly one instruction; possibly 0xc3 [ret] or 0x90 [nop]; the problem lies in how you define "complete Windows application", because the answer really differs depending on if you want to make it ABI compliant. But there's nothing preventing you from creating a custom loader/executor that reads a pure binary file, maps it as exec and runs it.
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo agoIt should be an exe file you can double click and execute.
- chuckadams 2mo agoA .COM file is exactly that, a pure binary that just starts executing at the first byte. Mind you the loader for those has gotten a smidge bigger since its first version.
- p0w3n3d 2mo agoLooks too kinky for me. WinAPI + C - okay. But not this
- ntstatusquo 2mo agoYou can get a sub 20kb executable with C in MSVC and no weird tricks, i.e. just setting a particular combination of compiler/linker flags, like /NODEFAULTIB, /MERGE, /FILEALIGN:512 etc. Small enough that it's basically nothing, downloads in a couple of seconds over 56k dialup, and you get to use normal tooling. This is the compromise that makes the most sense to me, for products you're actually shipping. If you want to try out the nocrt approach, honestly the LLMs do a fine job of writing you some replacements for the parts of the crt that you likely want i.e. memcpy/memcmp/strlen helpers, with x64/arm64 SIMD and all. Set /HEAP:4096,4096 and /STACK:65536,4096, write yourself a simple 100 line growable arena implementation, use that, avoid the heap entirely. Very quick and easy way to get a real windows program up and running that uses about 500kb of commit at baseline. You end up with only ntdll.dll, kernelbase.dll, and kernel32.dll loaded. Trying to eliminate any of these becomes pretty painful and you venture into the territory of weird tricks that are expensive to maintain. Dave's approach is a fun exercise though.
- Dwedit 2mo agoThen you load User32.dll, and you get 2MB of commit and 1MB of private bytes. Throw in a Message Box, and it's 272KB more private bytes and 388K more commit. Windows 10 makes it literally impossible to write something that uses low memory and uses an actual window.
- ntstatusquo 2mo agoTrue, the project where I used the approach above was a TUI, so windows terminal sort of eats the impact of stuff like user32 and dwrite for you. One trick I know of to make user32 a bit more lightweight is to call ImmDisableIme prior to creating your first window. This disables a lot of the TSF integration, which is notably quite slow. Not sure if it impacts memory footprint but worth a try. It of course does what the name says and disables IME support, so not a viable option if you have users who need IME
- Dwedit 2mo agoI made my own 64-byte MS-DOS stub that uses a shorter message "Win32 Only!" instead of the usual "This program can only be run in DOS mode" message. By using the shorter stub, using the secret flag to omit the Rich header, and possibly merging sections together, I can usually get the PE header to fit within 512 bytes, and the linker won't pad out the PE header to 1024 bytes. A copy can be found at https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCopilotKey/blob/main/stub.bin https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCopilotKey/blob/main/stub.bin
- iamthejuan 2mo agoWhen I hear assembly, two people always comes into my mind, Chris Sawyer and Steve Gibson.