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Someone

Weird title for a book on assembly

- for x64

- on Windows

- using MASM

There are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.

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What a weird, low-effort comment.

Randell’s got another (large) book on ARM assembly. He’s also got a handful of other great books on software engineering in general - he’s more than aware that “there are other 64-bit OSes, CPUs and assemblers for them, and people do use them.”

This particular title, “the art of assembly” has been around for a while. This x64 version is the latest iteration - it’s a great book compared to the previous version which introduced and focused on “high-level-assembly”, basically a collection of masm macros that effectively constituted a small language.

It’s fair to say that anyone even remotely interested on x86/64 assembly is aware of AoA.

You are quite right.

Anybody who is even cursorily interested in Assembly Programming knows of Randall Hyde and his works since he has been at it since the 16-bit days. One of the few authors with truly great depth.

Makes me think that most people commenting here know nothing about assembly and are simply posting empty comments for the heck of it. This has been a trend on HN lately of similar meaningless/useless comments on any topic.

You mean this:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-ARM-Assembly-Randall-Hyde/dp/1718... ?

Mmm nice. Will give it a try since ARM-based Mac is my main working environment nowadays.

You might also want to checkout the Assembly books by Larry Pyeatt (ARM only) and Daniel Kusswurm (x86 + ARM).

Another excellent classic which you should checkout if you are interested in all things ARM is ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software by Sloss, Symes and Wright. It is old and so does not cover newer ARM architectures but will give you a solid foundation for system programming.

Mr Kusswurm's x86 book is excellent. Didn't know he also write on for ARM. Thank you!

It's the result of seeking to maintain consistency with the titles of the previous books in the series. And while the platform coverage this time is very narrow, any book on assembly in general is going to have to pick some specific platforms and hope that the reader will be able to transfer the skills acquired to others as necessary.

If you're actually writing software in assembly (as opposed to merely optimizing hot functions in an otherwise high-level codebase), in my experience MASM is the most pleasant tool for the job.

MASM was a decent assembler, but it also had some syntax choices that lead to excessive verbosity.

In any case, today nasm is mostly equivalent with it, if not better, while being kept much more up-to-date with the Intel-AMD ISA extensions.

Out of idle curiosity: can NASM emit Windows unwind information? For the matter, can any assembler do so automatically?

The most pleasant is the one you're most familiar with. I still use gas with at&t syntax.

MASM's niceties go far beyond just syntax, though

I last used MASM back in about 1989 (with MS C on OS/2 1.0). Do you have any hints on how it has changed since then? What is nice about it, and why does the debugger not match up to CodeView?

Not exactly weird... I mean x64 Windows is still pretty popular. And pretty much any Windows dev will have Visual Studio installed (to get MASM).

Unless, you want to use open source MASM-compatible assemblers like JWASM or UASM.

Yes I understand, other folks may prefer Linux/BSD, NASM/FASM, ARM etc etc.

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