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- Hacker News
- I don’t get it. I am this books target market. Part of this demographic is that if you challenge me, I will accept the challenge. So challenging me to figure out how to do this by using AI instead of buying this book seems like a serious fail.
- > what Windows actually expects the vtable to look like
I'm not a Windows-knower, are vtable layouts part of the user<->kernel ABI?
by Retr0id - Yes, you either follow Itanium ABI (non Win) or MSVC ABI. Technically nothing stops _your_ compiler from implementing totally own conventions but it will only be compatible with itselfby boguscoder
- Thoroughly Understanding C++ ABI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145259by rramadass
- It’s part of the MSVC x64 ABI, not a part of the kernel ABI. The kernel and user mode (Win32) APIs all use C linkage so vtables are not relevant and the ABI is a convention of the compiler not the OS. Practically speaking though if your software runs on Windows it will probably use the MSVC ABI.by invokestatic
- All of the major kernel ABIs are using C function interfaces as their stable ABI (except Linux, which uses an assembly syscall instruction as the stable interface, although you still rely on a lot of the ancillary C ABI for things like struct layout or stack layout).
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.
by jcranmer - I'm sorry, MASM? All the cool kids use NASM or YASM.by csense
- TASM.by zerr
- I agree MASM is not easily available.by fithisux
- The Linux kernel prefers GAS (or clang) w/ the C preprocessor. Luckily most of clang's assembler unit tests (and LLVM's MC layer unit tests) also use GAS style syntax.by ndesaulniers
- Some still like FASM. Why NASM or YASM?by mdp2021
- At least it's not HLA or GAS.
Who else remembers the flamewars of the 90s between all the different factions of Asm programmers? MASM vs TASM vs RosAsm vs HLA (basically no one took GAS seriously at all)... it was in some ways quite similar to the Chrysler vs Ford vs GM wars.
by userbinator - I'm just gonna be the weirdo in this comment thread and say: yay! Assembly! The most god forsaken language i ever had to learn. But still very very useful
- Wow, I can't believe that the author is still updating the book! I'd learnt protected mode assembly from an older version of this book, decades ago. And IIRC, there was an even older 16-bit version of the book back then.
- Related;
1) All Assembly/C++ books by Daniel Kusswurm.
2) Low-level Programming: C, Assembly, and Program Execution on Intel 64 Architecture by Igor Zhirkov.
by rramadass - 3) x86-64 Assembly Language Programming with Ubuntu by Ed Jorgensen - https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/x86-64-assembly...by rramadass
- I am more curious about how they would cleanly manage hierarchical labels (usually called "namespaces"), register naming, and stack management with deep register spilling, description of the register state on the various entries from the various dominators of a code block.
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.
by sylware - I'm... confused. Don't we use macro assemblers anymore?by slashdave
- I built compiler that compiles to 16bit x86 via MASM. This books feel like a natural next step, but I was wondering if there is a linux equivalent book I can choose instead?by iamcreasy
- Weird title for a book on assembly
- for x64
- on Windows
- using MASM
There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.
by Someone - Not exactly weird... I mean x64 Windows is still pretty popular. And pretty much any Windows dev will have Visual Studio installed (to get MASM).
Unless, you want to use open source MASM-compatible assemblers like JWASM or UASM.
Yes I understand, other folks may prefer Linux/BSD, NASM/FASM, ARM etc etc.
by anta40 - If you're actually writing software in assembly (as opposed to merely optimizing hot functions in an otherwise high-level codebase), in my experience MASM is the most pleasant tool for the job.by Retr0id
- It's the result of seeking to maintain consistency with the titles of the previous books in the series. And while the platform coverage this time is very narrow, any book on assembly in general is going to have to pick some specific platforms and hope that the reader will be able to transfer the skills acquired to others as necessary.by leoc
- What a weird, low-effort comment.
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.
by agarren - Interesting to see that people are still spending much time on assembly languages :) I've had a lot of fun with it in recent years as well. (Shameless plug: I've written a few on LLVM integrated assembler regarding better fragments and improving expressions and relocations).
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.
by MaskRay - The GNU assembler is not intended to be used by humans, but its goal is to assemble the output of compilers.
On Linux, the "standard" assembler for humans is "nasm", though there are also others.
For anyone writing a non-negligible amount of code in an assembly language it is essential to develop or get from elsewhere a comprehensive library of macros, for avoiding to write huge amounts of boilerplate.
by adrian_b - i'm sorry, starting with "you can ask AI to … [but it'll do an incomplete and bad job]" and then launching forth into a hundred words of AI-produced text is not very appetizing
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
by tensegrist - This text doesn’t seem AI generated to me.by asibahi
- I know that we're discouraged from meta-comments, but what is going on in this thread? It's a nearly 800-page book about the art of programming. A huge amount of work on a topic that should be dear to our hearts. News for hackers, right?
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?
by skippyfish - this is what almost every hn post is: lowbrow reflexive/reactionary responses. it's been like this for years. try to call it out and you'll be censured by dang or one of the other police officers for being "uncharitable" or something like that <shrug>by mathisfun123