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x86 Assembler JWASM Hits Stable Release
Odoital writes "January 2010 is an exciting month for x86 assembly language developers. Software developer Andreas Grech, better known to the x86 assembly language community and the rest of the world by his handle "japheth," has released another version of JWASM — a steadily growing fork of the Open Watcom (WASM) assembler. The main benefit of JWASM, arguably, is the nearly full support of Microsoft's Macro Assembler (MASM) syntax. As those in the assembly language community may already know, Microsoft's desire to continually support the development of MASM has been dwindling over the years — if only measurable by a decreasing lack of interest, updates and bug fixes — and thus the future of MASM remains uncertain. While Intel-style syntax x86 assemblers such as NASM have been around for a while, JWASM opens up a new possibility to those familiar with MASM-style syntax to develop in the domains (i.e. other than Windows) in which assemblers such as NASM currently thrive. JWASM is a welcomed tool that supplements the entire x86 assembly language community and will hopefully, in time, generate new low-level interests and solutions."
To know how abandoned MASM really is... try and make an assembler project in 64 bit under Visual Studio 2008. It's not even supported out of the box - like, they never actually tested the configuration.
But, for all that, I prefer YASM as the assembler. Still, congrats to the OpenWatcom port.. NICE WORK. It's always good to have more hands in an area that so many people see as dead.
This is my sig.
I loved saying in an interview "I see you have x86 assembler on your resume". The color drains from the kid's face, I give 'em a snippet:
cwd
xor ax,dx
sub ax,dx
It's nothing rocket, just some fun with 2s-complement.
-- Rabid
I still weep slightly when I think of Watcom and their products. They were, by far, among the best out there in the 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, they made Borland's offerings look like garbage, and Borland was pretty damn good at that time, too.
Their assembler and C and C++ compilers were fucking amazing. Nobody generated faster code than them. I remember once moving some code from Microsoft's C++ compiler to Borland C++, and getting a 5 times speedup. Then we moved it from Borland C++ to Watcom C++, and got an additional 8 times speed improvement! We were totally blown away. Their code generator was just that much better than that of much larger competitors.
Watcom SQL was another gem. So much faster than the competition, but also so much easier to use and develop for. It's good to know that Sybase has kept this product alive and well.
To see such a small shop create some high-quality products is truly a testament to the fantastic talent that they had working there. It saddened me greatly to see them consumed by Powersoft, and then Sybase.
Articles about old hardware often get deleted too. Socket A motherboards and stuff. I've seen articles on older cellphone SoCs and their companies vanish as well. Apparently never getting large and then finally going out of business means you don't deserve to be noted in history.