But somehow, the discussion has three themes. It's 50+ comments of "I don't like the first sentence of the marketing copy", "I don't like the tool the author is using", and "what would happen if we train an LLM on this book?". Has anyone read the sample chapter? Did you like it? Anyone here owns volume 1 and has opinions about that?
When comparing GNU Assembler and MASM, GAS is missing many features: while loop, string processing (.e.g strlen)
> page 3: "It’s important to understand that MASM converts macro invocation arguments to text values before doing the macro expansion"
Like MASM, GAS uses call-by-name evaluation by default. While GAS's altmacro mode does allow for expression evaluation using syntax like `%(1+2)`, it has strict limitations: it only supports absolute expressions and is restricted to argument positions.
In contrast, MASM's % operator (page 8) looks far more general.
i hope this is the publisher's fault and the author replaces it with something decent of their own. contrary to the opinions i've heard around (including elsewhere on this thread) learning asm is still meaningful today and it's something i'd like to get better at so i will consider getting this book or one like it once $work is a bit less hectic
It's also one of the reasons its insanely popular in ESL countries and frustrating/disliked in English-speaking countries because it makes things easier in one and harder in the other.
It was never the goal, but it is the reality. The same style people call AI, was often called being a pedant or being wordy 10 years ago.
The thing that frustrates me the most about AI is how every thread in every forum spend half the time arguing whether an article is AI or not, as if bad writing only started to exist with AI. Just fucking don't read it.
- for x64
- on Windows
- using MASM
There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.
Randell’s got another (large) book on ARM assembly. He’s also got a handful of other great books on software engineering in general - he’s more than aware that “there are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.”
This particular title, “the art of assembly” has been around for a while. This x64 version is the latest iteration - it’s a great book compared to the previous version which introduced and focused on “high-level-assembly”, basically a collection of masm macros that effectively constituted a small language.
It’s fair to say that anyone even remotely interested on x86/64 assembly is aware of AoA.
I'm not a Windows-knower, are vtable layouts part of the user<->kernel ABI?
For C++ ABIs, there are really only 2.5 major ABIs: the MSVC ABI, used by MSVC and clang wanting to be compatible with MSVC, and the Itanium ABI, used for everything else. There are some slight variants on the Itanium ABI which makes the ".5": ARM uses a different layout for exception handling tables, and there are some flags you can set to use a more compressed vtable layout (32-bit offsets instead of 64-bit pointers). (There are other older ABIs, but either companies stopped making a C++ compiler or they switched to Itanium.)
Windows COM APIs (which isn't part of the kernel, they're still userspace libraries) rely on an IDL which is meant to be directly compatible with the C++ vtable. That said, they also use a restricted subset of C++ that all of the ABIs are going to agree on for vtable layout--if you don't overload any functions, and you don't have any virtual inheritance, there's pretty much only one possible sane vtable layout, and everyone does that.
That used to be the case anyway. It's possible they binned the C support in the switch to 64-bit. I haven't looked since.
Once LLMs are trained with the content of this book, then this statement will no longer be true.
If this book becomes even a bit popular, these LLMs will get access for sure to the content of this book in their next training.
This reads more like marketing copy targeting anti-AI sentiment than anything.
I strongly believe that the "future" should be LLM+Corpus - something beyond LoRA or RAG or context, but what we need and will have will be a generally strong LLM augmented with the most proper learning from the "selected library of relevant material".
And in parallel, also the reasoner over the corpus will be implemented (something that properly studies, not just reads, and achieves the pinnacle of reflection over the corpus).
Let us reformulate through the framework: the learned wrote books; the learners read them books, as many as possible in a ranked list; we may one day achieve automated learners; learned learners are our consultants; we benefit from the level of learning of them consultants; we would benefit greatly from the Perfected Learner; I gave a few lines of the general directions towards "thinking of them in view of building them" in the post above...
1) All Assembly/C++ books by Daniel Kusswurm.
2) Low-level Programming: C, Assembly, and Program Execution on Intel 64 Architecture by Igor Zhirkov.
I am doing all that with a basic C pre-processor in my assembly source code. But the more I think about this, the more I think I should write my own pre-processor, which "should" be much simpler than a C pre-processor in the end and would do a cleaner job since taylored for those usages (the "annoying" thing is the arithmetics expression evaluation).
I would write this pre-processor in assembly, namely design a binary specification (that to be ready for other ISA implementations).
Then, they are the really important things: for all micro-architectures, how to be friendly to conditional branch predicition, how to handle BTB entries layout in a cache line, show how important the "cache line" is ubiquitous, etc.
I remember clearly one of the TheHeavyThing developers telling me than with a basic and naive hand compilation of gzip, he was beating the best compilers, at that time, by a consistent 10/15%. Let me remind people here of something: nobody is supposed to be able to beat a compiler on deep and hairy compilation units. If it is the case, something is wrong in that compiler.
For instance, with a C pre-processor, I have a very lean C pre-processor dialect which allows me to assemble simple x86_64 code with... fasmg[12] or nasm(probably yasm) or gas(intel syntax).
A big project which was bitten by specific pre-processor abuse: ffmpeg with nasm (but it is still much less toxic than to start to be hard dependent on advanced and specific C compiler extensions... look a the failure from linux on that matter).