LIlifepillar·Feb 26, 2023
Yeah, it’s better to use a “high-level” language designed for the architecture, such as this: https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In How I learned to program a Commodore 64 in BASIC and compiled C (2020) [video]dschmenk
PLASMA
Assembly2016–2023
dschmenk / PLASMA
PLASMA
Proto Language AsSeMbler for All (formerly Apple)
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Proto Language AsSeMbler for All (formerly Apple)
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
8 sources> I do not know whether good macro-assemblers existed for 6502
They certainly did. I don't know about the communities that grew around Commodore, Atari, or other 6502-based computers, but in the Apple II world, there were multiple macro assemblers available. Possibly the most famous was Merlin. As a pre-teen, I used the Mindcraft Assembler. Mindcraft even sold another product called Macrosoft, which was a macro library for their assembler that tried to combine the speed of assembly language with a BASIC-like syntax. The major downside, compared to both hand-coded assembly and Applesoft BASIC (which was stored in a pre-tokenized binary format), was the size of the executable.
Edit: Speaking of simulating a more powerful CPU, Steve Wozniak implemented the SWEET16 [1] bytecode interpreter as part of his original Apple II ROM. Apple Pascal us
Read the rest
ed p-code. And a more recent bytecode interpreter for the Apple II is PLASMA [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
[2]: https://github.com/dschmenk/plasma
The developer would abandon this due to the inadequacies of the 6502 to handle a language like Java. He didn't give up though!
> PLASMA is a combination of operating environment, virtual machine, and assembler/compiler matched closely to the 6502 architecture. It is an attempt to satisfy a few challenges surrounding code size, efficient execution, small runtime and flexible code location. By architecting a unique bytecode that maps nearly one-to-one to the higher-level representation, the compiler can be very simple and execute quickly on the Apple II for a self-hosted environment. A modular approach provides for incremental development and code reuse. The syntax of the language is heavily influenced by assembly, Pascal, and C.
https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In A Java Virtual Machine for the 6502Have a look at PLASMA:
https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In PC DOS 1.1 from ScratchI wonder if the author is familiar with the PLASMA [1] language and bytecode VM for 6502-based Apple computers. That might be another interesting option to add to the comparison.
[1]: https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In Robot Game: Comparing 6502 C, Assembly, and ForthFor those into modern (!) medium-level 6502 programming, PLASMA [0] may be better (syntax-wise) than Forth and better (size and performance-wise) than C.
[0] https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In Original Source code for the Furby [pdf]This is what the PLASMA VM does (https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA). All opcodes are even numbers so that the dispatch addresses can be stored as two-byte addresses.
In Porting Sweet 16 (2004)You may be interested in PLASMA:
https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA
In Ways to implement computer languages on 6502s (1994)