(08-17-2023, 04:48 PM)bplus Wrote: Does FB do assembly? It seems to do everything else eg advanced array stuff.
This was done largely for the sake of Quick libraries, or for static libraries that worked in BASIC PDS v7.1. It could have been done also for the OS/2 "protected" mode. It was the never-ending quest even today of keeping this fast and small. The Purebasic programmers tried to teach like this at one point. An operating system which is 64-bit has made all of this largely pointless. We could address 18 trilliard fast enough, without knowing what is only known by the creators of "gcc" and the assembler that comes with it, and by their counterparts working for ApCo and M$.
EDIT: I said what I said about static libraries because BASIC PDS v7.1 did come with QBX which handled the Quick libraries. However Programmer's Workbench could not. It was recommended for serious applications to use the Workbench. Now I don't remember if Quick libraries still worked in Visual BASIC for MS-DOS, at least the first release.
Maybe some assembly routines could be converted but it's all 16-bit, and it should be translated into 32-bit or 64-bit. It also involves too many procedures written originally by M$ found in BQLB45.LIB or in BRUN45.LIB for QuickBASIC. That is one thing that will make it difficult, if not impossible to translate any assembly code from the book to work in QB64. Assembly language was something alien to people who invested too much in Qbasic instead.
Freebasic indeed could do assembly. But wonder why they haven't come up with "portable" sound, like importing a wave file and playing it back? Because it would have to work on BSD and Linux. In the least it could require Portaudio, but that's a driver, and it has nothing to do with assembly language. More than likely the assembly language is being used most extensively in the complicated MS-DOS port.