"Students Explore 64-bit Assembly Programming with AArch64"
A group of students in a Software Portability and Optimization course have been learning 64-bit assembly programming using the AArch64 platform. In their latest blog posts, they share their experiences and code implementations as they work through labs and projects.
The students began by writing a program that prints a message to stdout on each loop iteration, gradually enhancing the code logic. They used the school-hosted AArch64 server and set up the machine as a remote in VSCode using SSH. The students also installed the ARM Assembly extension for syntax highlighting.
Their implementation involved combining code snippets, adding placeholders for the loop index value, and modifying the code to print each value as a 2-digit decimal number. They also added logic to suppress leading zeros when printing numbers from 0-30.
The students found AArch64 assembly programming to be intuitive, with clear naming conventions for registers and relatively straightforward syntax. They appreciated the larger number of registers, dedicated instructions for complex math operations, and availability of system calls for printing.
Source: https://dev.to/arilloid/64-bit-assembly-programming-aarch64-4ng7