Re: [MiNT] XaAES sources for FreeMiNT 1.16.3

[Peter Persson <pep.fishmoose@gmail.com>]

>> I think this is a very, very bad idea. The goal should be to get rid of
>> assembler, not add more. I can't see how the future development of the AES
>> can benefit from obfuscated assembly code which ties it to a single CPU. I
>> programmed a lot of 68k and 6502-assembler in the 80's and early 90's, and I
>> don't intend to do that again.
>> 
> no body is asking you to, and once they are set, there should be no
> need to modify them. Of they become that outdated, they can (again) be
> replace by C functions

I tend to agree with Jo here. Maintainability is extremely important. Assembler should be used where it makes a difference, not in a higher level OS layer such as the AES. And I'm not saying this because I have some special affection towards higher level languages, because I don't. But we're not talking about texture mapping routines with tight inner loops here.

> The people on this planet who can write "algorithms in C that are hard
> to beat", usually have an excessive understanding of ASM (or how ASM
> is written in binary for, and executed at run time), and are as common
> as "hens teeth". This is not to say "none of those people are with
> earshot of this thread", but as you your self know writing good clean
> fast, or better still exceedingly fast, algorithms is actually quite
> complex, and may require much code rewrite, and tests for all
> situations.

No, this is just common sense. The best way to optimize something - regardless of language - is to find a better algorithm. I usually check the output of GCC to see if I could have a better job myself, and I often discover that while I might have been able to beat it by a few instructions, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever in practice.

> The fundamental flaw in your vision (and many others peoples who blow
> "only high level languages" trumpets), is that C is compiled into hex
> byte codes, when these are "read in an english/language style" they
> are called assembly instructions (as seen in any debugger - assembly
> numonics).

What exactly is your point here?

-- PeP