Current Assembler in Haiku?

Forum thread started by Octopus on Mon, 2014-04-14 10:47

Is it possible to develop directly in Assembler within the current Haiku Alpha release? Which are the tools / compilers to be used for that?

P.S.: does that Assembler also support German umlaut symbols in comments or labels?

Comments

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

Hello! :)

First of all, what do you mean by "developing directly in assembly"?
Do you mean to create GUI applications in assembly?
I believe Alpha 4.1 has yasm.

-- louisdem

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

Imagine a Chess program consisting of a GUI and an intelligent engine, which is merely a command line tool. That engine could be written in Assembler language, what sometimes might make sense. To write a GUI via Assembler indeed doesn't seem to be a good idea.

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

"To write a GUI via Assembler indeed doesn't seem to be a good idea."

It's amazing what can be done with a simple framebuffer. But, assembly code will never be the way-to-go for things like big apps, Aside from the obvious reasons, very few people could maintain the code. Ever tried Menuet? BLAZINGLY fast, but no apps. Well, relatively speaking. It does have some internet capability, but I'm not endorsing it or recommending it. It seems that keeping a Chromium style browser up to date on such a system would be a life endeavor.

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

You can compile both yasm and nasm on Haiku without much problems. On the nightlies we have recipes and packages for both.

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

On the base of nightlies I would not develop anything.

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

You can also write the engine in C/C++, plus it would be easier to maintain than assembly - unless you're an assembly code-monkey :p
Maybe even in python.
Explore the possibilities. Try the nightlies too.

-- louisdem

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

Writing a Chess engine in C++ is nothing new to me. Have a look on my pages: http://www.10x8.net/home/Computerschach.html

But I am thinking about to rewrite it in an optimized way using Assembler for some parts. But there is a need for a reliable OS and stably recommended development tools.

Re: Current Assembler in Haiku?

Well then, yasm is what we used for Alpha 4. It should compile out of the box on Haiku and I think there is an optional package for it. We switched to nasm again because it now supports some newer instructions that yasm doesn't have. Nasm should also compile out of the box on Haiku and work well, it was what we used before switching to yasm. It's just that you'll have to compile them yourself, instead of relying on existing packages&recipes. Or you can always wait for alpha5 :)