NASM vs MASM

[Twister]

I took this sentence from the NASM documentation in the section where it compares NASM to other x86 assemblers.

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MASM isn't very good, and it's (was) expensive, and it runs only under DOS

Thoughts anyone?  ::)

[ecube]

yeah I got some thoughts, like how the NASM team seemingly abandoned their crappy assembler for YEARS and only semi recently came back. MASM is a fantastic 32bit assembler, hence the popularity of it on this forum and various other places. Granted MASM64 turned out to be a dud, theres plenty of alternatives now adays like GoASM, I find NASM's syntax and lack of windows support pathetic and is essentially useless on windows. MASM32 and GoASM have fantastic headers/include files so you can take full advantage of the windows API, and extending it is very easy.

[raymond]

That must have been written eons ago and nobody ever bothered to modify it (specially that last part about DOS :snooty:).

[hutch--]

NASM has aways been nobbled in that it has been a volunteer project that has suffered being on again, off again over many years. While I am not up to date on it I gather thats its rebirth has been handled a lot better than its earlier versions and that it has a reasonable capacity for its targetted purpose. RE: The propaganda in the statement, very few who ever wrote nonsense like this ever knew how to write MASM code so you have little reason to take any notice of it. Recently (last couple of years) there was a support forum for the NASM project but I am not sure if its a user forum or a NASM developer forum.

In its place its been a good tool over time, it has its ideology and ideosyncracies but it has a useful capacity in producing binary code that at least some others have problems with. Its big advantage is that it is multi-platform and while there are now others as well, NASM has been useful in this area for a long time.

[GregL]

Granted MASM64 turned out to be a dud ...

ML64 doesn't support most of the high-level features that ML has but it sure does get the job done. I personally don't find it hard to use and I definitely don't consider it a dud.  I would think a proponent of "pure" assembler would love ML64.


Regarding the original post, all three statements are not true.  You tryin' to stir up trouble?  :bg