It's rare that I post unpopular opinions, but when I see an HN thread full of people talking about how terrible the tools are which helped me be successful, I just can't help but speak up. It's an important topic for me because I originally believed the consensus. Like all of you, I read the countless Internet comments which say things like GNU AS is meant only as a backend for GCC, that you must never write assembly, and if you do then AT&T syntax is the devil. As a result, I wasted half a year of my life trying to build APE using programs like nasm and fasm. It wasn't until I decided to use only GNU tools that I began making progress.
That’s a much different lens on the point you were making before. One could argue it’s an entirely different comment and, more importantly, that it yields an entire spectrum of conclusions that weren’t your original point. Before, you were saying “people don’t like AT&T because,” and a bunch of other pronouncements that made my triple-decade native eyebrow raise because they didn’t match my experiences, even squinting really hard. You’re also introducing ideas that are just completely wrong, like syntax having anything to do with the ld integration in gas (it doesn’t; read nearby).
Now you’re saying you were swayed by the idea that one shouldn’t use gas directly, which is an entirely different premise — and much more understandable.
You found a stack that worked for you to build APE. Those are your experiences. Pivoting those experiences to absolute observations about what is good or bad or elite is the error, here. And it’s ironic: you’re lamenting believing “the consensus” in your own journey while simultaneously influencing the consensus with conclusions that your available data didn’t earn. Passively responding to negative feedback toward positive replies suggests bad faith, too, so I’d ask if your contribution to the consensus is harmful, like those were that steered you another way.
I also bristle at a niche field having terms like “elite” used casually to influence people entering it, just like you were once upon a time, and I note you ignored that feedback in responding here. That’s also ironic because APE is challenging the idea of how native software is packaged and distributed, which itself requires outside the box thinking, and you’re using language and absolutist pronouncements to create a different box that has a right and wrong.
Your commentary here suggests to me that the loads of people waiting on you to change the world with APE might be waiting a while. That’s unfortunate and directly motivational.
I am curious to hear some specifics of why APE did not work with nasm or fasm. Your earlier comment mentioned "tight cooperation with the linker" -- I don't know what this means. My mental model is that all assemblers ultimately produce an object file. It's not clear to me what would make one object file integrate better with a linker than another, unless there are certain .o outputs that nasm or fasm were not capable of generating.
I don't think much hate is directed at the tools per say, but rather it's at the syntax. It's like how people complain about all the idiosyncrasies of English, without denying it's an important, useful language.
As Stroustrup put it: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”
