I'm interested to know if assembly coding is really necessary.
Well, as Jirka already pointed out, there are some low-level parts of
the kernel and system libraries where you need to have a complete
control of what the CPU is doing (even more control than C provides).
You can easily find such pieces of code in the HelenOS sources, just
look for the .S (and .s) files. E.g.:
http://trac.helenos.org/browser/mainline/kernel/arch/amd64/src/asm.S
Now, we use the assembly language since there is really almost no reason
(except for a few very rare cases) to write out binary opcodes manually.
Contrary to your quote, today's assemblers are pretty well-documented
and using it to generate code is rather straightforward (of course,
there are naturally platform-specific). And on the other hand, there is
really no good reason to use the assembler for any higher-level programming.
Is this what you are asking for?
[Just a friendly reminder: This is a HelenOS development mailing list.
We are happy to discuss even very broad topics here, but if you are
interested in Unix, there are perhaps more suitable lists for that.]
M.D.
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