this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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How hard could it be? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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[–] ericbomb@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To send the point home even more, this is how in python you make a line of text display:

print("Hello World")

This is the same thing, in assembly (According to a blog I found. I can't read this. I am not build better.)

  org  0x100        ; .com files always start 256 bytes into the segment

    ; int 21h is going to want...

    mov  dx, msg      ; the address of or message in dx
    mov  ah, 9        ; ah=9 - "print string" sub-function
    int  0x21         ; call dos services

    mov  ah, 0x4c     ; "terminate program" sub-function
    int  0x21         ; call dos services

    msg  db 'Hello, World!', 0x0d, 0x0a, '$'   ; $-terminated message

But python turns that cute little line up top, into that mess at the bottom.

I like python. Python is cute. Anyone can read python.

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That assembly is for a DOS application. It would be more verbose for a modern Linux or Win32 application and probably require a linker script.

But python turns that cute little line up top, into that mess at the bottom.

Technically, not quite. Python is interpreted, so it's more like "call the print function with this string parameter" gets fed into another program, which calls it's own functions to make it happen.

[–] UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago

This is what gcc 13.2.0 makes of it in Linux:

So basically just loading the string and calling 'printf' from the libc.

[–] ericbomb@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah over simplifying it a bit, and that's funny that the stupid thing I found wasn't even stupid enough.

But was mostly trying to impart that we should be happy for modern languages, because for every line you write in a modern language, it'll do a dozen things on the back end for you that in assembly you'd need to do by hand.