Comment by Razengan 3 days ago
I wish there were more articles and resources about modern ARM assembly. Not that I ever will or have programmed in Asm, but I like learning about it and imagining I will, and Intelisms feel so archaic and crusty in comparison.
This is my own channel, but I made a 10+ part series on modern ARM assembly you may find interesting. I used CPUlator for the demonstrations, which is a nice way to inspect the memory as well as the individual registers as you are running a program.
All runs in the browser:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn_It163He32Ujm-l_czgEBhb...
Thanks for your work on this. I’ve bookmarked several of these videos and used them as reference.
Learning assembly with a really good visualizer or debugger in hand is highly underrated; just watching numbers move around as you run your code is more fun than it has any right to be.
I really like Justine Tunney’s blinkenlights program. (https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/)
A version of that for AArch64 / RISC-V would be really cool.
Any reason for ARM specifically? There are a lot of microcontrollers out there that fairly simple but without Intel's crustiness. Atmel, for instance. And if you decide to actually try experimenting with them you can get yourself set up for it for less than $100.
I wouldn't say you are wrong, but I would also postulate.
The smallest, simplest, 'useful' (in terms of useful enough that lots of devs did good work with it and thus it might also be 'popular') ASM sets are probably also sufficient to start with. Provided you've got a good guide to using them, and also ideally a good sheet for why given instructions are packed the way they are in binary.
I do agree you're more likely to find pointers to such resources in more classic architectures. They're also more likely to be easy to find free copies of useful literature.
I'm not sure how "useful" or "good" the work is. But some one instruction computers have a considerable amount of tooling already in place.
i.e. https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump
Flip Jump is amazing. I understand the theory and how it works but it still amazes me that it does. Things like this is why I love the science in computer science.
And subleq even has a c-compiler and operating system, just wow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-instruction_set_computer#S...
I'm learning AArch64 assembly in the process of writing a code generator for it. godbolt.org is a great resource for "how do I do this?" Write a short function, run it through godbolt.org, see the instructions generated, lookup the instructions in the spec:
https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~zyedidia/arm64/encodingindex.h...
It'll be my keynote presentation at the D conference next month.
https://shop.elsevier.com/books/computer-organization-and-de...
It's currently 50% off and not only will you learn ARM, and some history about ISAs in general, but you'll learn more about how the computer itself works.
And if ARM isn't a hard requirement, an older edition that uses RISCV as the core ISA is a free download.
https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS295/assets/books/H...
Highly recommended.