Learning 64-bit ASM (amd64) on Linux

[steveL]

Yamakuzure: precisely. And if you've never learnt any asm whatsoever, none of it will make the slightest bit of sense. Whereas if you've learnt at least one to the level of coding up a basic app (which could be as simple as wc) then it's pretty easy to read an insn set manual for a new one, should that be needed when you're trying to work out what the compiler did with your code.

As you say that's most often in the context of single-stepping with gdb (or the GDB Plugin in Kate, which is just loverly. ;)

BTW for those who don't know, there's #gdb on freenode, as well as ##workingset for toolchain-related issues (best place to learn about autotools, as well as portable make.) [IRC: chat.freenode.net.]
You can also use: objdump -d to get a disassembly of your object files (RTM.)

[Yamakuzure]

[steveL]

You're more than welcome, Yamakuzure :-)

You're right ofc: what you want from a debugger plugin is to single-step through your source files which is exactly what Kate does, and blew me away when i first tried it: it simply is IDE functionality.

That's why I'm so enthusiastic about the recent kate work; although it always used to be because I like a lightweight editor that doesn't take up lots of resource, but still does enough, more and more I'm seeing just how useful it is, when you can add in the things you need, while leaving out the ones you don't. Thus I have a "Syntax" session which is purely for working on Kate highlighter files, which only has the XML validation plugin and my standard File and Documents viewers. I don't use XML for anything else, so none of my other sessions even needs to load it, but they typically have CTags and the Build plugin (for make integration.) I don't use gdb much (I tend to see it as a failure if I need to single-step C, but it does happen) so it's only in the Asm session, and one project's main session.

The latter is the main project I'm working on, and actually has several sessions depending on which aspect I want to work with; "Attach as Tab to.." in KDE 4.9+ has made this incredibly useful. it stops the taskbar idiocy being a problem (I now have windows overlapping the main taskbar at the top, which gives me more vertical space, which I love with a 4:3 LCD: better for my neck as well;) and also works wonderfully for groups, so I might have eg "System" and "Integration" sessions grouped, with both being visible as tabs. It's so elegant and so useful, because it's managed by the WM, and does not require anything from the apps themselves: a perfect example of how to use the Unix multi-processing model, with very little code, and no breaking of encapsulation.

More recently kate has added very good new python integration (I don't use it; I think it comes in with the python USE flag) which would be ideal for working on things like portage or pkgcore, or anything using their APIs (I believe gentoolkit also has some really nice python APIs, which dol-sen has done some great work on, where the portage APIs need extension.) To my knowledge, zmedico uses Kate for portage development, unless he's changed editor in the last 2 years or so.

Apart from that, the Kate javascript API is essentially equivalent to LISP in emacs, although perhaps not as extensive. And if you need to, one can always extend kate, either with a C++ plugin for kate itself (same as the GDB and Build plugins), or a KTextEditor plugin which will also work with kdevelop and kwrite, as well as python plugins if you have USE=python.

The best thing I've found, is that the developers are incredibly pleasant to deal with. They actually foster contribution, instead of putting people off with disparaging comments whenever someone says something they disagree with. That does not mean they are pushovers, by any means. They're mostly professional developers, even if they are unpaid for their Kate work; they tend to work on it because it helps their real work. It makes a very good testbed for work on languages and compilers.

Regards,
steveL.

[steveL]

[Yamakuzure]

[steveL]

[steveL]

You should try the kate command-line if you haven't already: press F7 (default.) vim users especially will appreciate this, since it matches :s/\t/ /g for example.

You use s/jsre/replace in line/g or: %s/js(re)/replace &1 all lines/g as per vim, but using kate regexen which are effectively the same as js ones, pretty close to pcre afaict.

So you have \b and \B, along with (?=positive) and (?!negative lookahead) and standard expansions like \n and \t.

Flags allowed are g (line-global) and i (case-insensitive).

There are an awful lot of other commands (see the first url); and you can make your own scriptlets to run as commands using javascript (scroll down to: "Command Line Scripts". The js API common to both command-line and syntax highlighting scripts, is below that, the last section.)

[steveL]

Someone brought this up, looked interesting:
http://www.pythian.com/blog/using-katesql-to-connect-to-an-oracle-database-in-kate/

He can't get it working on Ubuntu (it's from 2012, which might have some bearing), but I figured it'll be a lot easier on Gentoo, if someone is working with Oracle.

Yes this has turned into a thread on kate; I'm just keeping it all in one place, as it's more useful then.