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0 pointskibwen9mo ago0 comments

> Assembly is tied to the system you target and it can't really be "improved".

Of course it can. There's no reason for modern extensions to keep pumping out instructions named things like "VCTTPS2DQ" other than an adherence to cryptic tradition and a confidence that the people who read assembly code are poor saps who don't matter in the grand scheme of the industry, which is precisely my point. And even if x86 was set in stone centuries ago, there's no excuse for modern ISAs to follow suit other than complete apathy over the DX of assembly, and who can blame them?

> You can however improve ergonomics greatly via macros and everyone does this.

Yes, and surely you see how the existence of macro assemblers strengthens my argument?

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noobermin9mo ago

>poor saps who don't matter in the grand scheme of the industry

Someone is mad. Just because you don't have the patience for it doesn't mean everyone has the same preferences as you do.

Anyway, one could argue macros in assembly are part and parcel of the process if you develop things in assembly of significant complexity. If you don't like a particular instruction name, you could always relabel it in a macro to something you like. "Redesigning assembly" of an existing target otherwise makes no sense as a concept as assembly languages are usually specified by ISA designers as a target to meet the developers of compilers.

You can of course write your own assembler for yourself if you really want. That's the beauty of asm, you don't have to meet ideological targets for this or that PL school. You just need to admit the right byte codes, and that's sufficient. It doesn't guarantee things will work how you want though easily in a higher level sense, which is why most people use programming languages.

kibwenOP9mo ago

>> poor saps who don't matter in the grand scheme of the industry

> Someone is mad

You're completely misunderstanding me. This isn't my personal opinion, it's simply an observation of the utter indifference of ISA designers to any consideration of ergonomics or developer experience. The rest of your comment aptly explains ways to work around this fact while failing to understand that the whole point of this thread is that it didn't have to be this way. For example, there's no reason that an assembly language couldn't have basic syntactical affodances like namespaced identifiers or pseudo-structural elements like basic if, while, and switch. Hell, in the 80s we had chips that executed Lisp, and today we might still have some brave souls making chips that execute Forth. There's no law of the universe that says that assembly has to be jank and primitive.

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