Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2019 22:15:19 +0000 From: Lorenzo Salvadore <phascolarctos@protonmail.ch> To: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: any way asm people could contribute? Message-ID: <v_W7XGpyrMxtFm16tC8Nvl1WByLrRexDhjHPI62KdJWBu0bcxmClgVHjTr6I1Oy0hI1M9_kH3wxkJL_iLA5V9WycEPK9JN0nn13S334AENc=@protonmail.ch> In-Reply-To: <slrnq6bmm0.rmi.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de> References: <201902101556.x1AFu1JO027552@sdf.org> <U-T5V9GBTMH0X4T_hYmtSc4B19QRNPzkirSo_g45l-czdcQaEvhYekzafkZcQOM_Nb9IQ6Qx3EXEQ-aeRrDJkPrqMnQky88TZZlDfr9iTGA=@protonmail.ch> <slrnq6bmm0.rmi.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
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On Thursday 14 February 2019 22:16, Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.d= e> wrote: > On 2019-02-10, Lorenzo Salvadore via freebsd-questions freebsd-questions@= freebsd.org wrote: > > > Assembly is most often used for drivers: > > It is not. I don't know where you got that bizarre idea. > > Offhand, I'd say the biggest (as in lines of code) remaining use > of assembly language are optimized implementations of cryptographic > algorithms. However, the more popular the platform, the fewer gaps > there are to fill. > > Oh, and a general piece of sad wisdom I have learned over the last > twenty years: If somebody needs to ask how they can contribute, > they can't. I made my idea that Assembly is often used for drivers from a bit of experi= ence and documents such as this one: http://brokenthorn.com/Resources/OSDevIndex.html It is a tutorial for starting developing an OS. There is much of Assembly a= nd C, but the C that is in there really is a sort of high-level Assembly: of course, = as you do not have any OS yet, you do not have any C standard library to link with yet. I also happened to write some lines for a microcontroller: it was a pretty = short work, it would have been silly in this case to waste time using an existent C com= piler (if any) or to develop in "C as high-level Assembly". I talked with other people who also used Assembly for programming microproc= essors. Those web pages also claim Assembly is used for drivers: https://stackoverflow.com/a/791541 https://www.codeproject.com/articles/89460/why-learn-assembly-language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Current_usage Now, if your objection was about the words "most often", I might indeed be = wrong: I never made a statistical research on the topic and my impression might in= deed be wrong. About your last lines (the "general piece of sad wisdom"), I disagree. I wo= uld rather say that if somebody needs to ask how they can contribute, they can't *yet*: th= at's why they are asking! If they want to contribute but lacks knowledge, they can learn.= I do agree that some people that ask such questions ask them because they do not see t= hey are not ready (yet) to contribute, but it is not the rule and it does not preve= nt them to improve their skills: what can prevent some of them is the "if you need to = ask you can't" answer; on the other hand what can help them is point them to good learning= material. Lorenzo Salvadore.
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