NoMoreNicksLeft's Journal: Lwared lives!

Well, it turns out that Lwared hasn't worked since the early 2.0 kernels, ouch. Just got permission from the original authors to continue development, and will be releasing lwared-0.95-jo1 soon. Builds without a warning now, but still some issues with functionality... it's unable to recognize an interface's IPX addr. I have no explanation, as well as I can read the C code, it's not even trying, maybe I got ahold of a broken beta? Will have to check some of the pre 0.95 code to be sure.

Beginning to do prelimnary research on a VIP protocol stack for linux. (Banyan VINES, for those wondering). It won't be easy, I'm not that great of a programmer. Looks like I'm on my own though, no one else would even be interested.

Some friends and I are finally launching spalp.org. Society for the preservation of assembly language programming. Text book quality tutorials on asm for just about any cpu you can name, is our goal. At the moment, we have an intro to asm, and several 65xx chapters. Look forward to books on the z80, pic microcontroller, and motorola 68k before the end of the year. Contact us if you can help!

ASM tutorials

[Com2Kid]

Hey, good thing somebody is aware that ASM is a good thing, God knows way to many programmers are being indoctrinated into the "VBasic is the future" propoganda. (Yah, I have actually seen people say this. . . . and argue on about how good VB is for quite some time. Standard rhetoric is "well yes the earlier versions sucked but it is getting better every release now!" Bleh. )

People seem to forget that the higher level languages are just a more abstract metaphor that is EASIER to learn initially.

Once the basic learning hump is over with, the various metaphors work just about as well as one another, with some languages limiting you in some ways and other languages limiting you in others (hey, just like real life languages. . . . hmm... makes the obvious really clear. :) )

ASM has the advantage that once learned you can get ANYTHING done, yaah.

Not to mention that a compiler is NEVER going to be as fast as well done hand coded ASM simply because the compiler is not intelligent. The compiler does not have creative insight, nor does the compiler have intuitive leaps. The compiler compiles, yes it can optimize for certain common scenarios or even for some uncommon scenarios, but it can never customize your code the way it needs to be customized, it does not know what loops to prioritize on. Nobody would argue that a WYSIWYG HTML generator is less efficient that hand coded HTML, so why do people argue that higher level languages are less efficient that ASM?

ASM also has the advantage that you don't need source code to edit a program. :)

In fact in certain rare cases ASM hackers have been able to release patches to programs that the company who MADE the program was not able to release. Nifty stuff. ;)