Lately, I’ve been dabbling into some “closer to the metal” kind of programming.

On most compilers (Visual Studio’s one for instance) it used to be rather easy to mix assembly code and C++ code using a feature called inline assembly where the ASM code will be put in a block (decorated with a special macro/symbol like _asm for instance), and when the compiler sees that, it will put the content of this “as is” inside of the compiled code.

My first real introduction with programming was with the C programming language, on a French website that was, at the time, known by the “Le Site Du Zéro” (think “The newbie’s website”).

At this time, I was in middle school, and I was pretty bored by it. It’s around that time that I started to have really access to the internet at home, and started spending a lot of time on it.

Sometimes I wonder why some things are inside the C and C++ standard libraries, and some aren’t.

As far as I can be bothered to read the actual “standards” document (that are mostly written in legalize, not in understandable English for you and me), these languages are defined against an “abstract machine”, and the actual real-world implementation of them, on computers that actually exists, should follow the behavior described for that thing, modulo some implementations details.