The Future of ASM Development

ecube · March 20, 2009, 05:01:03 PM

I use masm a great deal in free lance projects, it's my job to convince the company im working for as to why ASM(masm being my flavor) is suitable language for their enterprise software. Over the years masm has been there for me, and been a real pleasure, however in the new era thats upon us with the introduction of the 64bit world i'm curious where the future of asm development is headed? Right now masms 64bit verisons seem awful and unusable, the author of jwasm who created a almost fully compadible masm clone abandonded us, the author of poasm made it clear he doesn't care about the asm community and the development of his tool is unknown. And with due to respect to projects like GoAsm, Fasm, Solar ASM, and the rest, they're pretty unknown and some without much longevity. To where is a masm programmer to turn? who will save us?

BlackVortex · March 20, 2009, 09:30:00 PM

I put my money on Jwasm. Just cause he left the forum doesn't mean jwasm is dead. Also, the project is opensource, anyone can contribute.

I'm not an expert, but it's not some huge undertaking to add 64-bit support. Or is it ?

GregL · March 20, 2009, 11:11:52 PM

Quote from: E^cubeRight now masms 64bit verisons seem awful and unusable

Not true. ML64 doesn't support a lot of the high-level directives, but it is definitely usable. I think it's kind of nice to get back to coding MASM old-style (no high-level stuff).

Quote from: BlackVortexI'm not an expert, but it's not some huge undertaking to add 64-bit support. Or is it ?

I would say it is.

Mark Jones · March 21, 2009, 07:38:42 PM

Japeth asked for help many times, and as far as I could tell, nobody offered. (I would have, but don't know C well enough to work my way around a hello-world program.) Anyways, this is not meant to be a rant.

Cube has a point, there are many assemblers out there. And despite diversity being good for most things in this world, I think it's counter-productive in assembly language, even damaging, to have so many "choices" for the same binary instructions. Not only is assembler non-portable, but having 8 assembler syntaxes on top of that? Might as well dictate that "to use assembler, you must code your own assembler." Then we'd have TomASM, DickASM, and HarryASM... :bg

Add onto that, this brave new world of 64-bit, where wormholes appear for no reason, and stack frames often gobble up entire programs, never to be seen again... and I would be questioning the future of assembly programming as well.

I suppose, we could always go back to binary...

GregL · March 21, 2009, 08:32:57 PM

I really haven't been that interested in JWASM, because I prefer MASM. It is the most popular assembler, it is part of Visual Studio you know. ml64.exe works fine if you take the time to learn how x64 works. At this point ml64 is not conducive to writing large programs all in assembly, but it can be done. As always, it is a good skill to know how to write optimized assembly modules for calling from C/C++.

32-bit isn't dead yet, but it's getting closer.

GoAsm and POASM would be my next choices. They both do x64 too.

Vortex · March 22, 2009, 09:07:18 AM

Quote from: Mark Jones on March 21, 2009, 07:38:42 PM
Japeth asked for help many times, and as far as I could tell, nobody offered.

That's true. Japheth is doing a very nice work. He asked for help, he was right because it's too much work for only one person to implement all possible new features

jj2007 · March 22, 2009, 09:43:46 AM

Quote from: Vortex on March 22, 2009, 09:07:18 AM
That's true. Japheth is doing a very nice work. He asked for help, he was right because it's too much work for only one person to implement all possible new features

He has done an absolutely brilliant job. The only problem that limits JWasm's usability is the error lines bug.
What strikes me, though, is how rapidly and silently the JWasm subforum and all its contents disappeared :boohoo:

hutch-- · March 22, 2009, 09:49:48 AM

:naughty:

> What strikes me, though, is how rapidly and silently the JWasm subforum and all its contents disappeared

Yes, it was nearly as rapid and silent as the author's abandonment of the subforum and his resignation as the moderator.

Vortex · March 22, 2009, 09:51:12 AM

Hi Hutch,

Is there any chance to get a zipped ( or in another form ) archive of the Jwasm subforum content?

BlackVortex · March 22, 2009, 12:35:06 PM

Yeah, why wasn't the subforum moved somewhere and locked ?

It just got binned ? :eek

hutch-- · March 22, 2009, 02:28:22 PM

Guys,

Without the projects author it was a dead subforum. As a matter of fact it is still there, it is just not visible as I changed the permissions for access to the subforum. You can still access Japheth's site and he now hosts the project on SourceForge, that is his choice, not mine so you would need to contact him for support for JWASM.

RE the suggestion of a ZIP file, you must never have seen a SMF database, there is no clean way of pulling the content of any particular subforum and this is because I am familiar with the format ofr MYSQLDUMP that I do the backups with.

Vortex · March 22, 2009, 08:33:03 PM

Hi Hucth,

I was thinking that the usage of a off-site website downloader would be helpful here. Yes,it's the author's choice.There is nothing we can do.

mitchi · March 22, 2009, 09:09:37 PM

What's up with ML64. What's missing from it ?

GregL · March 22, 2009, 09:24:16 PM

Quote from: mitchiWhat's up with ML64. What's missing from it ?

Most of the high-level directives. Which, in my opinion, is not a big deal.

PBrennick · March 22, 2009, 10:01:16 PM

It should not have been a surprise to anyone - the abandonment of the high-level directives - because we were warned this was coming as early as ml.exe, version 8.0.

In fact, Microsoft accepted input to get the general feelings of programmers. Evidently, the majority was against keeping them.

Paul

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The Future of ASM Development

ecube