alt Hacker NewsYeah, that's what I realized during this, too. You need to be much more explicit, but the way any given function works isn't fundamentally different. "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly, or whatever other language. I think it can feel almost more straightforward than other languages, since you're laying out exactly what the CPU needs to do, in what exact order.
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Agreed. And super cool project. After seeing Matt Godbolts Advent of Compiler Optimisations in December I decided to do AoC in assembly. Was the most fun I had in years even though I didn't finish all days!
And super educational. Since then I've been pondering which problems require dropping down to the assembly level. E.g. implementing a JIT compiler, a coroutine runtime, etc.
> "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly
Not all languages use NULL terminated strings. I think Rust actually stores the string length alongside a pointer to the start of the string data. You can do the same in C, but you'd have to do it manually using a struct. In assembly you could do the same thing since you get to decide basically everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8PLpDgZc0E