Teaching assembly (Re: Bug#443370: ITP: asmutils -- coreutils replacement written in i386 assembler)
23-09-2007, Bernd Zeimetz:
>
Some more context for compilers:
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/92499>
>> I can confirm that it is not faster since I tested it once, I think 'wc' it
>> was. And it is definitely not portable to other platforms either :-)
>> Nevertheless the package brings with it some spirit that is good to have:
>> love to assembly as a language. Maybe there are applications of this package
>> in the embedded world or for some "UNIX on a floppy disk"-kind of
>> distributions. I do not care for the moment. The educational aspect of this
>> package is what makes me want it for our distribution.
>
> For the educational aspect it would now nice to have this package at
> least in mips assembly, too, which is at least at my university used to
> teach assembly. It would also allow to compare the same implementation
> for different architectures.
What problems are with
`gcc -S --verbose-asm`
`objdump -S`?
Even more interesting would be (i guess), to see actual output of various
optimizations stages in gcc. And this is more interesting work for
students. Analyzing, what is done -- is part of any scientific
publication and academic work. Education (for me) is developed skill of
analyzing with comprehensive knowledge of history of the subject.
That's how one can deal with data coming right now.
So, why waste time with obsolete plain asm programming??? The term "asm
programming" means "teaching asm in *vacuum*". And this is wrong.
Problem is (from what i've seen), that GCC developers don't like to waste
much time looking in asm. Asm is a text output of GCC for them[0]. Kernel
developers like only C, and not many of them like to spend time looking
in actual asm, because they think, that -O2 good, -Os is better for
Embedded hype[1][2].
[0] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/91370
[1] http://mid.gmane.org/20070717151906.27208ebf.akpm@linux-foundation.org
[2] http://mid.gmane.org/alpine.LFD.0.999.0707171957300.27353@woody.linux-foundation.org
(care to look a little more in threads)
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