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FASM's license (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 13.09.2010, 22:27

> I would prefer implementing stuff in the existing open-source assemblers
> though - NASM, FASM, JWASM, depending on your syntax preference.

Herbert Kleebauer wrote his own but then (for portability?) wrote some fancy NASM macros to emulate it. Very weird 68000-ish syntax. And I think he did things the hard way for one example by writing an ELF executable from scratch! (The things people do to avoid linkers, heh.)

> What innovative ideas are OCTASM and SolarASM made of? I think I heard of
> SolarASM once but besides that I don't know either of them.
OCTASM is just different syntax, esp. multiple instructions on one line. It runs on OctaOS and DOS. The DOS version can be grabbed here while you'll have to get latest OctaOS from Sac.sk (for some reason, I guess he abandoned his Google Pages / Site, I haven't heard from him lately). It's public domain, I think, and assembles itself. (BTW, OctaOS also includes FASM.) Well, truly it only supports flat binary output, but it can link ELF somewhat.

SolarASM was an afterthought, Bogdan was originally writing with TASM using HLL constructs, so it emulates that. Of course, he at first GPL'd the OS, then closed it, opened it, closed it again, and now it's still closed (but barely updated?). Meh. It runs FASM too, allegedly. Anyways, I think SolarASM can run on Win32 also, and it produces output for various formats. Honestly, I haven't messed with it too much, but it definitely seemed interesting. (Well, they're all interesting to me, heh.) Read about it here.

> > I do like both a lot, though, truly.
>
> It cannot be! You must decide! :-D
None of them are perfect. Guess I might have to write my own!! ;-) j/k

> > Face it, old closed source
> > 16-bit OBJ libs are rare these days,
>
> True, but there are still interesting programs around that are only
> available as object.

Not Linux compatible? OBSOLETE! :lol:

> Besides, mixing (16-bit) C or any other HLL and
> Assembly is done best with OMF output.
 >
> > esp. considering how far Linux and
> > *BSD have come pretty much reimplementing everything from scratch.
>
> That doesn't come into 16-bit programming much though.
The point is that they can do "everything" (more or less) in 32-bit, so they don't care about 16-bit at all. What I find funny is that they hailed 32-bit so heavily, refused to even think about anything else, then 64-bit came and knocked them on their heads. Now all the arguments about "too much maintenance" are moot. If they don't support 64-bit, they aren't "kewl", so they've all rushed to that, even if most computers still have less than 4 GB. Even worse, it gives them an excuse to hate 16-bit even more.

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