News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on KolibriOS – operating system written entirely in assembly language. Parent comment

Re:KolibriOS – operating system written entirely in assembly... by rustybolt on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @03:39AM (#22875466)
I suspect a big win is that usually, programs from hand-written assembly will be smaller than compiler-generated binaries. For example, see [1], where a 32-bit GCC-generated binary (2.6 KB) is compared with a hand-written assembly program (45 bytes, although this is not representative). For reference, when I compile an empty program with GCC 8.3 on my 64-bit system, I get a 16KB binary.

[1] https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:KolibriOS – operating system written entirely in assembly... by adrianN on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @03:45AM (#22875489)
The constant overhead for compiler generated binaries is larger because the compiler doesn't optimize for the case of nearly empty programs. I'm not so sure that the benefits are that large once you have a decently sized piece of code.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:KolibriOS – operating system written entirely in assembly... by rustybolt on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @06:57AM (#22876347)
That's true. The overhead on relatively small systems with lot of simple binaries might stil be considerable. But it's probably not the main reason for the difference in snappiness.
[ Parent | on HN ]