Tell us a story

[MusicalMike]

Hey Hutch, if you have time to answer an inane request, I was wondering, if you couldtell me how the MASM32 project began. Why did you decide to use MASM (assapposed to a 3rd party product or even god forbit writing your own assembler). Be as thorough as posible. I am just curious.

[hutch--]

Mike,

Its a reasonably long story. Back in late 96 I like many others did not like the dev tools for 32 bit Windows so i started looking around for stuff that was worth using. I had an assembler background from the DOS days and still owned a few megabytes of 16 bit DOS code which was close to useless for 32 bit Windows. Through 97 I bought both the last versions of MASM and TASM and after doing enough work on both, chose MASM as it could do a lot more and handled far larger include files.

In early 97 I worked in the original Visual Assembler team run by "mammon" but was the only one to finish the stuff I was supposed to write and as it fell to pieces rather than waste the work building some of its tools, I started to put together a package that was reliable and standardised much of the programming interface for writing 32 bit Windows assembler. I don't suffer the "Visual Garbage" syndrome in any case so losing the rest of it did not matter much and because I owned all of my own toys and tools, I could put the project together without being beholding for much of it.

I developed the project in conjunction with a number of very good programmers who actually did understand low level programming properly. You will have heard the name Iczelion but there were many others whose name you will never hear (NDAs) who also contributed design, analysis and code to get the original version up and running. I released the first version in early 1998 and it has been taking off ever since.

While I certainly commend Tomasz and Jeremy Gordon for having done the work to write an assembler, the type of assembler required for a project of this type is beyond the capacity of even very skilled people like those I have mentioned and MASM does fit the bill here as it has been in development since 1981 and is maintained by a very large corporation for their own internal use complete with a corporate budget to do it properly.

Authoring an assembler and running a project like MASM32 are very different tasks and while I have never lost the interest in parsers and many of the other considerations necessary to build a compiler or an assembler, MASM is a good tool when understood properly and making it usable and convenient to write code with reached far more people than an obscure new assembler project.

Its never been a secret that the MASM32 project has been built by a reasonable number of people who are at least as cantankerous and difficult as I am and it is pointed at the next generation so that they will not be blinkered with much of the latter garbage that has been around for the last 10 years or so. This sum total of cantankerous old bastards expect the next generation to be smarter, faster and more efficient than we were because it is a harder world than we worked in when it mattered.

[MusicalMike]

Very strong words. LOL  Very interesting as well. Thank you.

Ps. What do you mean "Visual Garbage" Syndrome? You seemed to have an ax to grind there, (and by grind I mean send through an atom smasher).

[GregL]

Interesting stuff Hutch, thanks.  :U