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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I would argue they don’t know what that means really. Assembly is pretty much a mapping of words to machine code. It’s just a way to make machine code easier to read. It doesn’t actually change how it works.

    A compiler re-arranges and modifies things so what you write isn’t the same as the final program that is created. With assembly it is. It’s not really an abstraction, but a translation. It doesn’t move you further from the machine, it only makes it so you’re speaking the same language.


  • If you want some modern day fun with this, try the Zachtronics programming games; TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and Exapunks.

    Or, my personal favorite I only discovered somewhat recently, try Turing Complete. You start by designing all your logic gates from just a negate gate IIRC. You eventually build up an ALU and everything else you need and then create your own computer. Then you define your own assembly language and have to write programs in your assembly language that run on the computer you’ve designed to complete different tasks. It’s a highly underrated game, although it takes a certain type of person to enjoy.


  • This is pedantic, but assembly languages get “assembled” to machine code. This is somewhat similar to higher level languages being “compiled,” which eventually becomes assembly which gets assembled. The major reason why these are different is because a compiler changes the structure of the code. Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly, which is why it’s easy to go from machine code to assembly but decompiling doesn’t give you identical results to the original source code.

    Also, binary and hexadecimal are just different ways to view the same binary data and aren’t different things. There is only “machine code” which is a type of binary data but you can view binary with any arbitrary base, though obviously powers of 2 work better.


  • Cethin@lemmy.ziptoProgrammer Humor@programming.devCOMEFROM
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    10 days ago

    A function will be called by code and go to that point in code. To implement functions, you store necessary things to memory and goto the function definition. To implement that with comefrom you’d have to have a list of all the places that need to call the function as comefroms before the function definition. It’d be a mess to read. We almost never care where we are coming from. We care where we’re going to. We want to say “call function foo” not “foo takes control at line x.”






  • Yeah, both have pros and cons. I have Steam installed through pacman and flatpak also. For me I have the Flatpak version because it contains its own version of glibc. This mostly doesn’t matter, except I play Squad and it’s doing something with it’s anti-cheat that isn’t supported in the most recent versions of glibc, so I use the Flatpak version for Squad only.

    Flatpak is essentially a more controlled environment. It will contain everything it needs to work, which is good for ensuring it works but bad because you’ll have duplicates. It mostly doesn’t matter which you use, but occasionally it does.




  • A friend brought up some Ubisoft game (that I’m not that interested in) that is exclusive to their launcher. I was 90% sure this was an indication there was no hope for Linux there. I googled it and they apparently had already promised they would be strongly supporting Linux. A shitty company like Ubisoft is supporting it. I think we’re very close.

    I’d be very curious to see the hours played on games by OS. The last data I saw of probable usage percent had Linux at 4%, but I’d bet a large number of Windows and Mac machines are mostly just web browser machines. I would suspect Linux users are more likely to be gamers as they’ve already shown more interest in technology.

    I don’t know what percent we need to be mainstream, but we’re on a good trgectory. If we can manage to hit 10% I doubt it could be overlooked anymore. Also, every person who swaps over is one more person who’s likely to push others to swap. It’s a slippery slope. We’ll get there.


  • Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this option. Maybe for some basic question, but don’t follow its directions for anything technical and absolutely don’t enter any commands it gives you unless you know what they do. It makes stuff up all the time. It’ll sound confident, but if you’re a new user you don’t know enough to know what it’s telling you to do.

    For that matter, don’t enter any commands you see online without looking at it first. You can’t trust everyone.