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jay3ld · Mar 18, 2006, 06:08 PM

I need to know if Macs support ASM. This is some type of code a programer used to write one of his programs. Hes willing to try for a mac if it isn't to much trouble and wants to know if the Macs support this type of code so a port over to a mac version would be as simple as a gui.

Thanks

Chuckit · Mar 18, 2006, 06:15 PM

Er…ASM is shorthand for assembly language. It's totally processor-dependent. So while you can write a Mac program in assembly, whether or not that will run on a given box depends on what kind of processor it was written for. PowerPC Macs will run programs written in PowerPC assembly while x86 Macs will run programs written in x86 assembly.

Who the heck writes a whole program in assembly, though?

jay3ld · Mar 18, 2006, 06:20 PM

not all of it is in asm. he has c and c++ in it as well. but i know those are mac compatible so i was just worried about asm.
So what you are saying is it will depend on what processor written for.. makes some sense. but it will work though. thats good. means shouldn't be much rewriting.

jamil5454 · Mar 18, 2006, 06:36 PM

If he's converting from one processor's assembly to another, he'll most likely have some issues converting the assembly code. C/C++ is relatively processor independent.

Millennium · Mar 20, 2006, 05:33 PM

Unfortunately, the only real response to "Do Macs support ASM" is "which one?" Every processor has its own form of assembly language, and it is usually very hard to port ASM code written for one processor to another. This is one of the reasons high-level languages are so commonly used today: it is much easier to port such code between architectures.

So the real question here is this: what computers does this program your friend wrote run on? Without that information, it's not really possible to answer the question. My guess is that your friend probably wrote it in Intel ASM, in which case it should work, but only on Intel Macs. In order to support PowerPC-based Macs, he would need to rewrite it in Intel ASM parts in PowerPC ASM. I highly recommend that your friend do this; porting from Intel to PPC is much easier than the other way around.