An IRC Bot in Arm Assembler

by wyc • 12 years ago

116 49 12 years ago

cyorir2• 12 years ago

I see more good asm examples are being devoloped. This is a good, cool start for connecting to IRC, but it would be even more cool to see the bot do something beyond looking for a single line. What do you plan to do with it, if I might ask? Your motivation is listed as "lol" ...

wyc• 12 years ago

Support for modules written in C.

Alupis8• 12 years ago

This is truly a arm asm gem :)

L8D• 12 years ago

If you think this is cool, go ahead and check out bfb, an IRC bot written in a derivative of Brainfuck.

https://github.com/billiob/bfb

Alupis8• 12 years ago

The license the author of the BrainFuck example has chosen (or made up) actually is pretty restrictive, if not immature.

Software licensing is not a joke.

The author's account on Github seems to have many projects were a license has been either made up, or adapted. Perhaps out of lack of understanding current licensing and available licenses.

They could check this site out for some help: https://tldrlegal.com/

If the author intends to allow anyone to use the codebase for anything, they should choose an existing license that permits this... such as the MIT, Apache, BSD licenses, etc. Making one up is not an acceptable replacement and would not hold up in court should it ever come to that. "But judge, the author said I could do 'WHAT THE FUCK I WANT'!". :(

lloeki2• 12 years ago

FAQ #7:

    >> Can’t you change the wording? It’s inappropriate / childish / not corporate-compliant.
    > 
    > The WTFPL lets you relicense the work under any other license.

Also, see FAQ #6 and #8.

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/

sophacles• 12 years ago

I'll go ahead and feed the troll: please back up your statement that the license won't hold up in court. The site you link to has an entry for the "do what the fuck you want license v2" and there is literally no warning, and the only restriction mentioned is that a change to the license text requires a change to the license name.

So again: exactly what is the problem (beyond hand-wavy unevidenced claims about judges)?

billiob• 12 years ago

I am the author of bfb. It started as a joke with coworkers. I still consider it a joke but I'm proud of it! I like to use the wtfpl for simple code I wrote (like ptyproxy, a code I wrote on a sunday afternoon that I use to debug Terminology (under 2-clause BSD)). I don't expect much contributions on these projects anyway. If you're really concerned about the license and want to use my code in one of your projects, just send me an email and we'll talk about it. Since I'm the sole author of most of that code, I am still able to put it under a 2-clause BSD license.

I do hope you're not restraining yourself from contributing to bfb because of the software license ☺

Could you please point me which licenses were made up or adapted on my repositories?

The only repository I could change is photoalbum because it might useful to someone else.

tlrobinson• 12 years ago

Dude, it's an IRC bot written in Brainfuck.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I get that you care, but you don't seem to have a dog in this fight, so why care so much? More specifically, its always useful to say

"Hey while that license is really creative, you realize that its also not doing you any favors. Three things that you might want to watch for are warranty issues, the ability to reassign to any license means you can be barred from using your own code, and someone can reassign the copyright to themselves and then take down your site with a DMCA. That is a lot of risk to carry just to be clever with the license."

The author seems to like it the way it is and you've shined your light on the risk, hope it doesn't show up as another HN post on how evil lawyers did evil things.

dgl• 12 years ago

The very site the (downvoted) parent references points out that WTFPL is actually a perfectly fine licence: https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-wtf-you-want-to-public-lice...

See also GNU's site: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL Fair enough that they don't recommend it, but they believe it is GPL compatible.

daveloyall• 12 years ago

Question. Does this run in Linux on arm? Or does it run on the CPU (be it hardware or emulated)?

Bonus question: How can I answer that question for myself in the future when looking at similar source? Said differently: What am I looking at here? :)

paraboul• 12 years ago

It runs on an OS (POSIX compliant). If you look at connect.s you can see that he uses syscalls (connect()/socket()). It's roughly what would produce a simple compiler targeting linux.

Otherwise, it would have had to write a TCP stack, drivers, ...

vhost-• 12 years ago

Oh my god, it would be so cool if you could boot to this. Raspberry Pi irc bot. Literally.

Alupis8• 12 years ago

He uses Linux sys calls, which means the kernel needs to be there (and a libc of some sorts)... but that's all that's needed. So, with the RPi, you could essentially "boot" this code with pretty much a bare-metal system otherwise.

makmanalp2• 12 years ago

  socket_call: .long 281
  connect_call: .long 283

How does one get these numbers?

edit: https://github.com/wyc/armbot/blob/master/connect.s#L55

dima55• 12 years ago

Those are linux system call IDs: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm/include/uapi/a...

makmanalp2• 12 years ago

Thanks! Reading through the linux source is always funny if nothing else:

/* syscall to call a syscall! / http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm/include/uapi/a...

/ 222 for tux */ http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm/include/uapi/a...

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Can the mods change the title to ARM Assembly? Case matters, this has nothing to do with a body part.

mattgodbolt• 12 years ago

Assembly used to be all the rage. At Uni I couldn't afford a C compiler (and there were no free versions for my platform, RISC OS) so I ended up writing a whole IRC Client, GUI and scripting language all in ARM assembler.

A few tattered notes of it at: http://xania.org/200711/irbasic but sadly most is lost to time.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

I used to follow with joy of a kid that gets new toys, the release of each new processor and the new set of available opcodes.

Nowadays even C++ is simple, compared to mastering all the opcodes and their side effects in latest generation processors.

deft• 12 years ago

I love assembly, and ARM is pretty neat! Nice work man.

Zelphyr• 12 years ago

I love that I'm seeing more of these little apps written in Assembly on HN.

One request though: would someone be so kind as to take the time to annotate them so noobs like me can know what's going on? I think these are great ways to learn Assembly--something I've wanted to do for awhile. I've long felt that understanding coding at that level would only strengthen my skills in higher-level languages.

markb139• 12 years ago

There seems to be a bug in the string compare function. If either string is empty the function return 0 meaning success.

cturner• 12 years ago

Last time I looked, the canonical manuals for the ARM architecture were quite expensive. If anyone has advice on piecing the basics together please let me know. I don't know much assembly, am currently playing with 6502 assembly, and have been writing a 32-bit VM just by working it out as I go.

I do have a set of reference manuals, opportunity purchase, for acorn-era ARM systems. What sort of consistency would I find between historic ARM instruction set and the latest 32 and 64 bit versions?

JoachimSchipper• 12 years ago

"ARM Architecture Reference Manual" yields quite a few hits for various ARM systems, including ARMv8; the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 instruction set is also available.

One big change is that modern ARM processors tend to run mostly in Thumb (16-bit instruction) mode. It's faster, but you lose all the fun condition codes. High-performance code should take advantage of NEON.

If the above does not answer your question, please ask a more specific one. ;-)

An IRC Bot in Arm Assembler

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