Are the differences between FASM1 and FASMG documented somewhere?

(http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?p=178756#178756 2015-Mar)

- FASMG lacks all those Intel instructions
- FASMG lacks all those formats MZ PE ELF ...
- FASMG can support other CPU's (http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19389)
- FASMG lacks TIMES and ALIGN (latter has limited usefulness, fills with NOP's only)
- FASMG lacks @F @B @@ (http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19446)
- FASMG lacks the preprocessor and the "fix" directive, macros are processed "later", this saves much memory (but the increased need for macros costs other memory) (http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19366 http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=7019)
- FASMG lacks DEBUG features, they would have to be implemented in macros (http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19434)
- FASMG suports the EMIT directive (http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=19438)
- FASMG refuses to work if output filename is not specified
- FASMG allows to bunch errors, while FASM1 aborts after just 1 error (there was a thread about this, I just can't find it)
- FASMG is slower (factor 150 ?) I'll test on my cool Pentium 1 laptop
- FASMG is less bloated (factor 2.4) 48 KiO only ... below 64 KiO segment limit
- FASMG has no DOS version yet
- FASMG has no IDE yet

Today I tried to selfcompile FASMG ... works while the same (?) 0.98 version from 2 days ago did NOT.

What's the point of the large version string (source does not match the EXE) ?

BUG: manual says "0.97"

EDIT : enhanced from big thread

The word "bloated" suggests to me that it has something unnecessary. Do you think fasm has unnecessary things? Also, if you include all the necessary macros for fasmg to become equivalent in operation to fasm does it still come in as smaller than fasm?

Although this metric is completely irrelevant IMO. But I guess the three people in the world that still have working floppy drives will be happy with the smaller size.

There was this big thread where I discussed many of the differences even before fasmg was first released.

Thanks.

> There was this big thread

1+1/2 years ago

Could it be that the "unrealistic idea" has become true with FASMG?

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=7019 "[unrealistic idea]Decrease FASM memory usage" 2007-May

This should not matter if it is the information on differences between fasm and fasmg languages that you are looking for. Not much has changed since then, other than implementing some features that I promised but were still not ready on the first release, like the floating-point numbers. I had the language of fasmg designed in detail before I started implementing it, because a careful design of all the relations within the language was needed to make something that would not fall apart.

This question has no straightforward answer, because the differences between languages also enforce huge differences in the implementation. While fasmg generally does not save on memory and creates lots of symbol tables and string/file caches, it also does not generate an entire preprocessed source as a one big text in memory like fasm does - when a macro is called in fasmg, the lines are processed directly from that macro definition.

> does not generate an entire preprocessed source
> as a one big text in memory like fasm

So the problem does not exist anymore as described in the thread, but FASMG needs other memory due to the many complex macros. Maybe I'll test this at some time.

> if it is the information on differences between
> fasm and fasmg languages that you are looking for

YES it is.

> I had the language of fasmg designed in detail before I
> started implementing it, because a careful design

This is a very uncommon and very good attitude