x86 Assembler JWASM Hits Stable Release 209
Odoital writes "January 2010 is an exciting month for x86 assembly language developers. Software developer Andreas Grech, better known to the x86 assembly language community and the rest of the world by his handle "japheth," has released another version of JWASM — a steadily growing fork of the Open Watcom (WASM) assembler. The main benefit of JWASM, arguably, is the nearly full support of Microsoft's Macro Assembler (MASM) syntax. As those in the assembly language community may already know, Microsoft's desire to continually support the development of MASM has been dwindling over the years — if only measurable by a decreasing lack of interest, updates and bug fixes — and thus the future of MASM remains uncertain. While Intel-style syntax x86 assemblers such as NASM have been around for a while, JWASM opens up a new possibility to those familiar with MASM-style syntax to develop in the domains (i.e. other than Windows) in which assemblers such as NASM currently thrive. JWASM is a welcomed tool that supplements the entire x86 assembly language community and will hopefully, in time, generate new low-level interests and solutions."
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is precisely why Facebook requires 30,000 servers.
Re:That's good news (Score:4, Insightful)
You forgot to jump around your message, or put it at the end, or use segments to tell the assembler to do that automatically.
Re:Wikiwars (Score:5, Insightful)
Be warned -- JWASM's Wikipedia article was nominated for deletion
And that right there's why I won't donate a penny to that project. Honestly, WTF? That article's source is about 13KB long. At $100/TB, it costs about 1/7800th of a penny to store. "But what if it clutters up the site!", say the Deletionists. Apparently there's an alternate front page to Wikipedia that lists every single article and it's critical that it be kept tidy and short.
Actually, I take that back: can I send Wikipedia a penny and sponsor a few thousand articles of my choosing, starting with this one?
Re:xor my heart (Score:3, Insightful)
not needed for MMX anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
You can use compiler builtins for SIMD these days (fairly standardized across Intel, GNU, etc. compilers). (And don't complain about portability if you are using hand-coded SIMD....you have to be using #ifdefs or something anyway.)
Aside from using specialized instructions that are usually accessible from C anyway via builtins, it's not like x86 assembly has much relationship anymore to what actually happens in the hardware; you can't even control the real registers anymore (most CPUs have many more physical registers than are exposed in the instruction set, and rename on the fly).
Besides, most useful optimizations are much higher-level than that (besides the obvious question of algorithm choices, performance is typically dominated by memory access and you are better off focusing on locality than instruction-level efficiency).
Re:Wikiwars (Score:4, Insightful)
we wouldn't want an article on every person ever lived
Why? Say that's 10 billion people, and each article is 10KB. That comes out to 100TB and a modest database to reference it all. In 2010 technology, I could afford to buy and run that hardware out of my basement if I really wanted to. Keep in mind that hosting 10G articles is a lot different from serving that many.
As long as it doesn't bog down the search engine, is there any practical reason to care? Especially when instead of 10G articles, we're talking about something on the order of 1 million.