15 comments

  • haunter 8 minutes ago

    Meanwhile in the Unix world you can go as low as 45 bytes https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

  • delta_p_delta_x 37 minutes ago

    Interesting to bypass CRT and work directly against the Windows API. That said, these rely on USER.32.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL to do the majority of the heavy lifting.

    It's a bit like 'smallest hello world in assembly' but the code is just setting up the calling convention and then passing the zero-terminated character string into `write`. Cool, but that could be done a bit more straightforwardly in C, too. A lot of assembly (including in the linked repository) is book-keeping for the platform's calling convention.

    • skrellm 26 minutes ago

      > That said, these rely on USER.32.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL to do the majority of the heavy lifting.

      Since the low-level Windows kernel API is undocumented and non-public, using these system DLLs is your only option on Windows.

      It's just like linking against libc.so on any POSIX systems.

    • munchler 8 minutes ago

      It’s a minimal Windows app, so the whole idea is to rely on Windows DLLs as much as possible.

  • WillAdams 41 minutes ago

    For more of the same (though I wish source was available) which actually does something useful, see the various small utilities at

    https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

  • eggy 43 minutes ago

    I should try FASM to see if it produces a smaller size exe. COM files are small, but 16-bit DOS was the thing back in the day - 100H yeah and basically a memory dump.

    • Bluestein 43 minutes ago

      > 100H yeah and basically a memory dump

      ... the days! :)

  • drdexebtjl 40 minutes ago

    The developer, Dave Plummer, left Microsoft to develop and distribute malware and scams in the 90s. See previous thread at [1].

    Nowadays he spreads misinformation disguised as war stories from his time at Microsoft.

    [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813625

  • taf2 an hour ago

    love this and it's timely as I think with AI more of my code will just be native assembly for example: https://github.com/taf2/tic-tac-toe my m series native assembly based tic tac toe windowed game... very portable too you just simply execute codex --yolo port my app to x y z host...

    • eggy 37 minutes ago

      I haven't played with yolo yet. I'll have to use my airgapped, old Lenovo ThinkPad for this! Whenever I see yolo, I can't stop thinking of Joseph Redmon's YOLO and his astounding resume format!