126
Linus Torvalds Takes On A Performance Patch: "I Relax By Playing With Inline Assembly"
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
126 points (98.5% liked)
Programming
17669 readers
174 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
He says this because he kind of ignorantly (his own wordage) wrote in machine code for quite some time before realizing assembly was a thing. So for Linus inline assembly is to machine code as python is to c for a lot of us.
One of my oldest programming books is all about using machine language to program.
https://vintageapple.org/apple_ii/pdf/Apple_Machine_Language_1981_(raw-bw).pdf
At the time, even assemblers cost money. I remember saving up for Merlin which is an assembler for the Apple II.
What does he mean by machine code? Like assembly files or literally 1s and 0s?
He didn't realize assembly was a thing, so he was actually writing machine code instructions
He was probably working with bytes and not individual bits, but yeah. He basically wrote executables directly (to my understanding).