Not an issue for NASM, since it's written in C.

What in specific makes flat assembler better than NASM?

I know why the web for UI took over, but I sure do miss Windows forms-based applications. The web is fine for the UI to a bank or some other tool you don't interact with that often, but for tools where you can spend hours working inside, browser-based interfaces are terrible.

This is probably not a problem of the principal slowness of the software. With a high likelihood (source: personal programming experience of my colleagues and me), the root cause when the GUI freezes in such situation is typically rather that some operation that needs a little bit of time (say, a server request) is done in the GUI thread, thus blocking the processing of any other event (message). Windows programming is very sensitive in this regard.

I have not looked at this at this software in particular, but the few assembly web engines I have looked at in the past had worse performance that C versions due to making a much higher number of syscalls. For example, multiple send calls per response; lack of pool allocators; etc...

Assembly, however, pushes towards healthier design choices. You have to keep things simple since you are the one who pays for the complexity, not a third-party library providers who use several third-party libraries themselves.

Regardless of what language is serving up the request.

Still neat though.

A lot of heavy lifting isn't even done in Assembly. Not to say anything of what it's using for a TCP stack. I don't know where in the Amdahl's distribution the assembly part falls, but I'm guessing it ain't much.

Edit: Also now that I perused the link, I wonder how many people commenting here are confused and are actually commenting on the speed of the Fossil browser vs the actual forum.

If you’re going to take the trouble of writing assembly, you should do it right; figure out the fastest you can theoretically go, and see if you can get within a few percent of that without using assembly. If you can, stop. If not, figure out why you can’t, file compiler bugs as applicable, and then write assembly where it’s necessary. Re-measure, and if you aren’t within a few percent, figure out why not, then go back to step 1.

The thing is, optimizing compilers don't actually do any optimization in the classical sense. They don't do run-measure-modify loop as programmers do so all they can apply to the code is the heuristics some other programmers taught them. Some things are trivial like loop unrolling or function inlining. Some are not, like trigonometric approximations.

In the long run, when a compiler stops, a person goes further. That's why empirically, hand-made code is still faster than the compiled one. Of course you can write slow code in Assembly, but if you already decided to go low, you'll optimize your thing until satisfied with the result.

One particular thing comes to mind, C is ridiculously bad with automatic superscalarization (try VTune's HPC characterization on any code you like and see). Sure, you can use intrinsics and implement things manually, but that would be essentially the same as writing in assembly.

There is another contender though. Spiral (https://spiral.net/) that actually do solve the optimization problem can in fact be as effective as a human programmer and at a fraction of the cost. Spiral is overly specialized, so it's not a threat to all the HPC, but a more generic thing may indeed become a gamechanger.

https://clang.godbolt.org/z/MrMxo678x

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13

There is a reason (well actually there are many) that the vast majority of software development these days is done using more advanced languages.

Hmm. maybe there's a bug in one of the lines of someone's code.

Guess I better get started investigating it. 'Cause once I'm done I've got to start porting it to RISC-V.

In general, writing something in assembly won’t be faster. Some expert can in certain cases come up with a better hot loop in asm, but for larger scopes we can’t be as diligent as a machine can be.

There isn't anything about assembly language that makes it inherently more effective or efficient than a high level language.

If I had millions of person-hours to RE all the apps I hate, I'd just write them in Rust or something.

if you find a software stack that aligns itself perfectly with any single dogma (outside maybe TempleOS) then let me know, but right now that seems like a pipe dream.

I mean, just as food for thought, is there any common-use cryptography without major ties to war parties and national security groups?

aside: I can think of plenty of more practical reasons to avoid a net-facing forum software written in asm in 2023.

On a related note, I somewhat recently posted just the link to the very religious SQLite ethics page on Facebook - which immediately flagged it as some objectionable something or other. Just a link to a web page of one of the most popular open source packages on the planet which Facebook itself no doubt uses. They're so incredibly leftist that their algorithms can't even abide linking to a religiously oriented page.