Astro Hacker News - SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)

dang |next [-]

Related. Others?

SBCL: The Assembly Code Breadboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39859849 - March 2024 (19 comments)

SBCL: Assembly code breadboard (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450473 - Sept 2021 (4 comments)

SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959147 - June 2016 (2 comments)

SBCL: The Ultimate Assembly Code Breadboard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408807 - March 2014 (75 comments)

Jtsummers |root |parent [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39859849 - 19 comments, March 2024

dang |root |parent [-]

Inserted above. Thanks!

snazz |next |previous [-]

I’ve read this article every time it’s gotten posted here and it’s always gone a little over my head. I was able to follow how he used 8 x86_64 registers for the VM’s stack slots and how the VM instructions were implemented. How the padding and alignments of each version of the instructions was calculated is impressive and I can imagine how much of a chore it would be to figure out with a normal assembler.

Using SBCL as a macro-assembler is extremely cool, and then allowing CL code to call into the VM is where it really blows my mind.

Obviously it’s been over a decade since this article was written. For someone less familiar with SBCL internals (or CL in general), would something like AsmJit or Iced be a good way to achieve similar things?

nxobject |root |parent |next [-]

> Using SBCL as a macro-assembler is extremely cool, and then allowing CL code to call into the VM is where it really blows my mind.

Absolutely. I think TFA is hooking into the actual code emitter used by SBCL's evaluator-compiler, since it's not actually primitive, but implemented in Lisp and loaded into the image itself.

My guess at context: from the earliest days of Lisp, I think there was an expectation that Lisp systems would expose as much of their internals as possible... including their internal JIT, which is being plugged into here. I think the name for it was the "LISP Assembly Program" (LAP).

larme |root |parent |previous [-]

Try pair reading it with a good thinking LLM like GPT 5.5 or Claude Opus. I found it help me a lot.

I have started learning SBCL internal from the beginning of this year with the help of GPT, and I really want to contribute to SBCL compiler someday in future.

BoingBoomTschak |previous [-]

https://www.stylewarning.com/posts/nbody/ might be a good addition, it showcases some higher level stuff added in sb-simd.