I've definitely had code that some assemblers accepted and others didn't on the same arch, so even if they could be equally expressive in practice they aren't. Fairly sure that's also true of inline assembly on clang x64, had to change between intel and at&t for something a while ago.
Cooperation with the linker comes with other directives and options. gas has tight cooperation with GNU ld via directives, not instruction syntax. It can actually be set to accept either AT&T or Intel syntax, without losing any support for other features.
Your accomplishments have zero to do with the ‘elite’ tooling you use (why are you gatekeeping and creating class distinctions out of assemblers?), and more that you’ve taken the time to really think about how memory is laid out and how the architecture works - which most of us who started out writing operating systems instead of Rails understand perfectly fine. Nothing about the relationship between gas and ld achieves uniqueness not seen in other native stacks. That’s just made up.
There are multiple operating systems built with hand written NASM. Arguing about assemblers like they matter for more than five seconds is tiring 1990s IRC stuff. They turn syntax into a byte layout. It’s like realizing oh, this assembler sucks at ELF, why don’t I just hand lay one out? and boom, you’re on the way to APE. And really, if you don’t like your assembler, an “elite” programmer would write their own, but that fell out of fashion before most of us were alive.
Given the knowledge it takes to write something like APE I know you know what I’m saying, too, so why are you misleading like this? It comes across like an overstretched attempt to promote your work for a reader who knows the stuff you’re talking about.
I didn’t think it ever really makes sense to disagree with a comment like this, unless one is claiming that the content of your comment is intentionally untrue. Anyways, appreciate your perspective.
Now you’re saying you were swayed by the idea that one shouldn’t use gas directly, which is an entirely different premise — and much more understandable.
You found a stack that worked for you to build APE. Those are your experiences. Pivoting those experiences to absolute observations about what is good or bad or elite is the error, here. And it’s ironic: you’re lamenting believing “the consensus” in your own journey while simultaneously influencing the consensus with conclusions that your available data didn’t earn. Passively responding to negative feedback toward positive replies suggests bad faith, too, so I’d ask if your contribution to the consensus is harmful, like those were that steered you another way.
I also bristle at a niche field having terms like “elite” used casually to influence people entering it, just like you were once upon a time, and I note you ignored that feedback in responding here. That’s also ironic because APE is challenging the idea of how native software is packaged and distributed, which itself requires outside the box thinking, and you’re using language and absolutist pronouncements to create a different box that has a right and wrong.
Your commentary here suggests to me that the loads of people waiting on you to change the world with APE might be waiting a while. That’s unfortunate and directly motivational.
As Stroustrup put it: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”