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Linus Torvalds Takes On A Performance Patch: "I Relax By Playing With Inline Assembly"
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Programming
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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.
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
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.