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"I can think of absolutely zero reason to write an entire program in x86 assembly," I can think of 2 reasons: study and fun.
by ohwp 14y ago
"I can think of absolutely zero reason to write an entire program in x86 assembly,"
I can think of 2 reasons: study and fun.
- tedajax 14y agoFor x86 I'd say study but I don't think there's any fun to be had there. Something like MIPS32 would be pretty fun because that instruction set actually makes sense to a human.
- LockeWatts 14y agoI'm in a class using MIPS, and I don't find it fun.
- ryanmolden 14y agoOh, come on, the ModR/M byte, opcode extensions, variable length instructions, opcode prefixes, what's not to love </sarcasm>
- bitwize 14y agoFunny. x86 was designed to be understandable to humans. MIPS32 was designed to be more suitable for compilers.
- mikeash 14y ago8086, maybe, but I don't think we can say that modern x86 was "designed" for any one thing at all. Modern x86 is an excellent example of what you get when you evolve something for decades with backwards compatibility as a paramount requirement and little other consistent guidance, for all the good and bad that implies.
- wfunction 14y agoThe LOADALL instruction is certainly fun to get working though!
- tripzilch 14y agowriting 4096 byte demos and similar, back in the day, I can assure you I had fun coding x86 asm :) maybe if the Asphyxia tutorials hadn't been written for Turbo Pascal (+inline asm) and the C-compilers (back in '97) were really that good at optimizing as comments here suggest, I'd have gone a different route. but still, that's just performance. I doubt a compiler can beat a human at size optimization, cramming as much audio-visual power into as little bytes as possible--although executable-packers have come a loooong loong way since then (and impressively, afaik mostly by research and not so much Moore's law).