TOPIC:

Probably a crazy question, in an area where I have no experience, but I figure I'll ask anyway...

Is there any way to write snippets of assembly in VO?

I need to do a bit of 64 bit arithmetic on some FILETIME structures (docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/a...-minwinbase-filetime). Every forum post I read for C++ says that the C++ runtime has long contained support for 64 bit calculations on a 32 bit process. As far as I'm aware VO uses the C++ runtime (at least we ship it with our app), so I'm wondering if I might be able to directly access some of those instructions.

I know C++ has some support for embedding assembly (en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/asm), I don't suppose VO has some hidden feature to allow that, without essentially writing a virus?

I'll probably just end up providing the 64 bit arithmetic functions via a C++ DLL taking _WINULARGE_INTEGER structures as parameters. My first thought was to write a 64 bit adder in VO. I figured this might still be an interesting question to have answered, however.

Any other suggestions?
Cheers.

Hi Robert,
of course you can write a DLL in VO to use in X# or C#.
But be aware that VO is 32 bit only, so this limits your X# application to 32 bit too.
The only possibility to overcome this bitness gap is to build a COM module in VO and use that in X#.
But IMHO the .NET framework has much more possibilities than VO.
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang.

I need it to work the other way around. I'm planning to write a DLL in C++ or some other language to be able to perform arithmetic on 64bit numbers while in a 32 bit world. The C++ runtime apparently supports that. VO will call the DLL to perform any operations on the 64bit numbers.

C++ 64bit subtract for example:
VO will interface using the _WINULARGE_INTEGER structure, but can only see it as 2xDWORD values.

Although I'm going with the DLL approach, I was still curious if I could somehow write assembly directly in the VO IDE.

Cheers.

Hi Robert,
as long as there is the possibility to call a C/C++ API, you can do that of course also in VO and don't need to write a C++ DLL.
On the VO side you have to deal with the structure as AFAIK there is no datatype for 64 bit numbers - or you can put that in a class and work with that one.
Wolfgang

Robert,

robert.pope wrote: Hi Wolfgang.
Although I'm going with the DLL approach, I was still curious if I could somehow write assembly directly in the VO IDE.

A long time ago there was a project call NASM (Nantucket Assembler) . This was something that Ralf Saborowski did.
This allowed you to store assembly source code in your VO repository and link the assembled code with your VO EXE/DLL.
Maybe you can find information about that in old conference notes or on the web.

Robert

IIRC, that should have been at Devcon 98. Was rather cool, it was enough to add a "NASM" in front of you method deklaration...

Guys,

in the SDT 04/1999 there´s an article from SABO about NASM.

If anyone is interested, take a look at Frans Wauters VO site and search for filenames like 'NASM'.

vo.wautersit.com/pubcavo

btw. There are even patches available for VO 1.0

regards
Karl-Heinz

Hi Robert and anyone else that is interested,
Attached is a version of NASM for VO 2.8 from Frans de Witt (found in my extensive archives).
And no, I have never tried to use it myself.
Good luck
Don