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Re: [LUG] OT: 64bit Flash Player

 

On 22/08/10 18:45, Rob Beard wrote:
On 22/08/10 17:39, tom wrote:

I think there is a problem of - a) no (new) machine code programmers any
more - its a dying art and understanding the nuances of machine code is
too hard for current point and click merchants.

But isn't most of this sort of stuff written in C/C++ now so it can be adapted between platforms? Okay maybe Flash isn't such a good example, but take the Linux kernel for instance. If that was written in machine code or assembler then it would be CPU specific wouldn't it, so x86 code wouldn't work on PPC, ARM, MIPS, Alpha, MC68k etc, it would be just limited to x86 compatible CPUs.

Rob


If that WERE the case then it would be a simple change to a single header file or compile flag and that would be that - I think flash, like windows, has a large blocks of what should be legacy assembly code. Us old programmers are old enough to know that there was a lot of synergy between the machine code and the algorithms adopted to be executed on them. The coders would probably have been capable of writing useful code in all of the above 32 bit cpus, but even they would have trouble doing 64bit code on more than a couple of them. There are cases where you should simply not try to extend code any more but scrap it and start again from scratch. Windows and Flash are two examples that spring to mind - but then neither are really needed any more.
Tom te tom te tom

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