Sparc assembly anyone?

[Randux]

Hi guys, do you have any good resources for learning Sparc assembly? So far I have collected the Sparc ABI and Sun's Sparc assembler reference manual but they are not really learning resources for a beginner.

[rocket357]

I started off learning sparc assembly a few years back on a friend's Gentoo box...never really went anywhere with it though. If I can dig up some of the references I used I'll post 'em here.

[Randux]

That's wild. I didn't realize Gentoo had a Sparc port. Thanks.

In principle I think RISC machines ought to be pretty nice to code assembly on. I haven't any experience with them until now so it will be a bit of a learning curve for me.

[backrow]

Originally Posted by Randux

In principle I think RISC machines ought to be pretty nice to code assembly on. I haven't any experience with them until now so it will be a bit of a learning curve for me.

I found PowerPC (RISC) to be very easy to program. But since my prior assembly experience was with Z80, I’m not sure how much of that was RISC‐ness and how much was “Wait, you have how many registers?”

[Randux]

Oh, I am used to having lots of registers and a really nice OS even though the machine I code on has become very CISC over the years so I find x86 very hard to deal with! Renewed respect for you guys who coded on Z80s and other uProcessors in the olden days.

People say you should learn a lot of programming languages just so you have different ways to look at problems. Coding in assembly on different platforms is a real eye opener. You have to totally rethink how you design stuff from one machine and os to the next.