Post #2301184
2026-05-04 23:44 UTC
Replies (2)
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@regehr@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 23:45
@resistor@mastodon.online @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @penguin42@mastodon.org.uk hahaha I think the most fun I've had programming in the last 3-4 years was implementing Neon in arm-tv. so I should know better.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-05-05 06:28
@resistor@mastodon.online @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @regehr@mastodon.social @penguin42@mastodon.org.uk AArch32 (including T32) is probably the last ISA and assembly language that was designed for assembly-language programmers first, compilers second. RiscOS was almost entirely assembly, and assembly written in their style is weird: in many ways it feels like a higher-level language than C, but you have to do register allocation yourself. After RiscOS started moving away from assembly, a lot of mobile platforms that were key markets for Arm wrote a lot of assembly because they didn’t trust mid ‘90s C compilers to do a good job with memory efficiency (especially stack space). I believe Symbian was originally mostly assembly, though EKA2 wasn’t (and EKA2 is the reason everyone who is interested in operating systems should study Symbian).