I was just wondering. Next year i will hopefully be beginning my course in a bachelor of professional software development. I am how ever interested in ASM and i was wondering if it would be better for me to learn MASM or just continue with Inline ASM in C++?
Paul,
Technically it is a better proposition to write assembler in seperate modules as inline assembler tends to mess up the internal optimisation that the compiler performs. In the coming generation of 64 bit compiler, most don't allow inline asm so you will not have much choice.
Late model compilers often don't need much assembler but if you will have to design high performance code for specialised tasks, writing seperate modules is a good technique in any case as it helps with code that must be ported to another plaform if the platform specific code is in a seperate module as it can be replaced more easily that way.
Kk thanks for the info i have been messing around with MASM for a while but i might get stuck into it properly now ;)
Paul,
Have a look at Pelle's C development package, it's free and has a lot of powerfull tools. The compiler supports inline assembly.
It's trival work to call a support dll for almost any compilier. BTW, it will almost always survive HLL 'improvements' or patches, etc..
It's my opinion, that you get the most bang for the buck from an assembler coded & optimised support dll.
I code in VB because it makes management happy. I turbo charge the VB with ASM support dlls. The stand alone utilities are in 100% pure ASM. Really, why load a huge HLL support dll when you need to do a few simple things?
Regards, P1 :8)