Pete, I still fiddle in IOT and assembly and (just) C (something brief) are great for turning tuned loops into suntrackers et. al. It's great when one doesn't need to install a database on a Linux mPU so that a python loop can do something with gmail. BTW, Python has enough storage built-ins that you don't need it to save parameters... but doing any scrapping means having a place to put thing. I like HLL when I need them and Assembly when I need it. (tools in the toolbox).
On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 11:44 AM Pete Soper <[email protected]> wrote: > Mike, > > You're absolutely right about the difference between ISAs to assembly > language programmers. The latitude can be very wide. Long ago I found Intel > 8086 assembler incredibly painful compared to the other ISAs I'd used a lot > and many of those that came later. The 8086 irregular modes and limited > registers , stinking memory segmentation making branch instruction > selection existential and shams like movs that were slower than loops of > plain moves made writing fast and dense coding into an arcane art. Later I > did compiler back ends for the National NS32k and that was a thing of > beauty while still technically CISC. My first RISC was the Motorola 88k and > the only assembler I did was a rewrite of libm transcendentals (like trig > functions) that had been created by guys that only wanted to win > benchmarks, not to satisfy the military with a F18 simulator that happened > to work. But the 88k had a ton of instructions and had a kitchen sink feel. > I worked with folks using MIPS and Intel 860: hard core RISC processors and > both with exposed pipelines that forced the programmer to schedule > instructions, turning assembly language coding into another arcane art. The > vast majority of folks using those chips were thankful for compilers that > could do the right thing and allow them to avoid the complexity of > assembler. > > In 2011 I fell in love with the TI MSP430 RISC ISA (not caring that it was > yesterday's news, to put it mildly). I spent a few years expecting to have > a ball writing structured assembler "any day now". It never happened as > there was always something more important. Now I feel modern chips are so > efficient and the ubiquity of gcc and other advanced compilers means IMO > the only situation needing assembly code is for a coffee maker or something > like a trampoline that cannot be expressed in C (e.g. code to get you from > one stack context to another) and hey, that's what asm statements are for, > right? :-) > > Pete > On 8/16/26 18:25, Mike Lisanke wrote: > > Pete, On the surface this appears to be pot-shots at RISC in-general. What > many (including me) didn't know is, RISC > has become a significant alternative to CISC. Why? Because orthogonal > register usage makes a lot of sense And > that Addressing modes solve A lot of problems. I was surprises at how > Complex the Reduced Instruction Set Computing > had become and the degree that ISC was a big topic in the computing > industry. I know that MIPS and other specs tell > us RISC doesn't compete well But that hasn't stopped all the small and big > low-power specialized processors from being > RISC... you posted a longish document so I've only scanned it at this > point. But it'd be interesting to banter about RISC v > CISC at some point. > > On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 6:09 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Here is a critique of RISCV that makes a number of points: some objective >> and some subjective: >> >> https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV >> >> >> Here is a rebuttal challenging some of the points above and filling in >> major blanks. This is from someone with a great deal of embedded experience >> who lives in an economically challenged location. IMO this blurb makes it >> much easier to see the far reaching advantages of RISCV: >> https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/ >> >> Pete >> _______________________________________________ >> Triangle, NC Embedded Interest Group mailing list >> >> To post message: [email protected] >> List info: >> http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org >> TriEmbed web site: https://TriEmbed.org >> To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: mailto: >> [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe >> Searchable email archive available at >> https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ >> >> > > -- > Best regards, Mike > > -- Best regards, Mike
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