The flat assembler (which assembles this project) is worth checking out if you haven't already: <a href="https://flatassembler.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://flatassembler.net</a>. I first played around with it almost 20 years ago and it was noticeably more ergonomic and productive than masm, nasm, to say nothing of gas. I imagine it was designed for human programmers rather than primarily compiler front ends, so it's a popular choice for hand-written assembly projects.
This is amazingly fast to my eyes.<p>I am endlessly annoyed by slow interfaces. At $DAYJOB I have to use a web and desktop GUI for managing CheckPoint firewalls. These often will freeze for dozens of seconds, and generally make my computer crawl. I feel that this should not be acceptable in 2023.
It makes me happy to see people still build stuff like this.<p>Also interesting that they host their code on Fossil, which itself has a builtin forum engine written in C.<p><a href="https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki</a>
I don't understand — isn't the speed mostly limited by network or disk access? Is there a significant improvement by having the underlying code in Assembly?<p>A very cool application regardless, I haven't seen Assembly since college now.
Real-time notifications give a sense of activity, nice for building a community. Reminds me of <a href="http://listen.hatnote.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://listen.hatnote.com/</a> showing live wikipedia edits, but more integrated. Some anonymity, or mention of a group, e.g. anonymous users, forum member, admin, would be better. Too much and too specific sharing of activity makes this feel stifling--more like chat with read notifications, less like email or forum where people take time to compose replies.
Fantastic forum engine, the demo is <a href="https://board.asm32.info/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://board.asm32.info/</a> and beautiful themes are at <a href="https://asmbb.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://asmbb.org</a>
Got me thinking. How easy is it to write Assembly that looks good but is slower than C?<p>Like can you be really good with Assembly and still not be certain your effort is actually worth not doing it in a higher language?
Not exactly a forum as we now know it, but I believe Bill Basham's Diversi-Dial (DDial) BBS software for the Apple II was written entirely in assembly. <a href="https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-party-line/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://paleotronic.com/2019/09/28/diversi-dial-an-apple-ii-...</a>
I looked into maybe using this a few months ago, but decided against it.<p><a href="https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#16249" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://board.asm32.info/hi-johnfound-welcome-back.351/#1624...</a>
Garbage collecting interpreters are (mostly) for wimpy scripting kiddies. The obvious historically documented exceptions are the "Symbolic AI Researchers."<p>In 1990, SQL (and dBASE and Excel) was a "computer language" for secretaries. Now in 2023, we suffer uneducated halfwits manically typing in endless repugnant "ad tech" and "SEO" with our "Bioinformatics Researcher" hacks inflicting delusions based on Excel #Err cells (look it up) upon an unwitting populace.<p>Somewhere, we went wrong. We have GREAT and WISE Software Engineering (Prescriptive and Historical) guidance available in the public domain now. Our mercenary "job hoppers) don't seem to be interested in accessing that.<p>Going forward, some combination of ASM and Forth in Open Source incarnations and with type-checking hints will wring the most computation out of energy resources (CPU cycles).