Because Ryan wrote it like this 10 years ago and nobody bothered to rewrite it in C.
Back then, I’d guess most developers were relatively fluent in assembly, so if there’s only a small change to make, they’d just change the assembly and move on.
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TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 1 month ago
Wonder what the reason was for so much being in raw assembly when C existed. A basic library/API would be one of the first things I'd tackle in an OS. Move on to a higher level as soon as you're able.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 month ago
palordrolap@kbin.social 1 month ago
Compilers were much less complex back then and didn't do a great deal of optimisation. Also hardware was slow, so your compiled code, which wasn't necessarily optimal either before or after the compilation phase, was at least half as fast as you wanted it to be.
If you wanted speed, you hand-rolled assembly.