Linus Torvalds Takes On A Performance Patch: "I Relax By Playing With Inline Assembly"
Linus Torvalds Takes On A Performance Patch: "I Relax By Playing With Inline Assembly"
Yes, who haven't had a glass of red wine, relaxing music and some inline assembly....
I relax by listening to my HDD spinning. Which technically is a lower level than assembly.
8 Hours of defrag | hard disk defragmentation ASMR | Hard Disk Sound Effect | HDD sounds
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KR3TbL3Tl6M
😁
that sound arouses me tbh
He says this because he kind of ignorantly (his own wordage) wrote in machine code for quite some time before realizing assembly was a thing. So for Linus inline assembly is to machine code as python is to c for a lot of us.
One of my oldest programming books is all about using machine language to program.
https://vintageapple.org/apple_ii/pdf/Apple_Machine_Language_1981_(raw-bw).pdf
At the time, even assemblers cost money. I remember saving up for Merlin which is an assembler for the Apple II.
What does he mean by machine code? Like assembly files or literally 1s and 0s?
He was probably working with bytes and not individual bits, but yeah. He basically wrote executables directly (to my understanding).
He didn't realize assembly was a thing, so he was actually writing machine code instructions
As usual his code might be a great thing, but his pretentious attitude is still shit.
"Ah yes look at me I have written, oh my dare I say, some ASSEMBLY honhonhonhonhonhon"
That this is a big thing seems wild to me.
Assembly isn't such a big thing, some devs use it daily (Hello to my embedded devs out there) so why is this worthy a news article?
the dude wrote a kernel, I very much doubt he needs to brag about his ability to write assembly.
I know. He's a legend. And I respect his work. He doesn't need to brag.
And yet he does.
That's not being pretentious, that's being blunt. I personally as a dev, appreciate that.
If you think the code can be improved you should say that, and exactly why that's the case. When you're mistaken you should be able to take the criticism.
Your mission as a dev is to write the ideal code, and being overly polite can stand in the way of that.