Hello, Assembly! Retrocoding the World's Smallest Windows App in x86 ASM

Fun fact: Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in assembly. There was just a little bit of C code to glue the game into the Win32 API. To date, it's the only assembly program that I know which deliberately contains crashing. :)

It's only low enough level if you've hand stitched it into rope memory as they did on the apollo flight computer. All these fancy text editors, pah!

"As you know I wrote the Windows task manager." - That quote made me click the Subscribe button, you're one of my personal heros I never knew I had.

When I wrote some assembly code in the early 90s I wouldn't have imagined that one day I'd be seeing someone's screen with 753,488,695,296 bytes of free space next to a 7,292 bytes assembly code. Also: insane assembly coding skills displayed in the 21st century.

7:06 Dave just casually flexing his typing speed :D

From buying MS-DOS in a Retail Box, to watching the creation of the World’s Smallest Windows App, what a time to be alive!

Been programming for 3 years, it's amazing how Dave shows you what true mastery looks like while remaining incredible humble. Makes you think about what it really means to BE a programmer. You sir are an inspiring.

Watching Dave livecode is as relaxing as watching Bob Ross paint. I haven't done Win32 programming in over a decade, but this brought back some great memories.

Gosh, this channel is a gem

I also grew up in the '80s but I was in Louisiana. As you might expect, things were not great for a computer nerd during those days. I had my Commodore 64, banging out BASIC scripts, but I lacked resources or a mentor that could take me to the next level. My guidance counselors, who didn't understand computers, didn't encourage me to go down that path for a career. I literally thought you could be a scientist or work in a store. Retail is what I ended up doing for 10 years, though I was always building my own PCs. I finally broke into the IT support business and never looked back. Still can't code very well though. I wish I had focused on it more when I was young. So if you are a young person, or a parent of one, and your child shows an inclination to learn programming, by all means support them and try to encourage them to learn as much as they can.

It is actually scary to see this video and think "oh, looks like he is just speeding it up a bit." But then you look at the webcam and realize he is really typing this fast. This man would dominate typeracer

Even for a modern C++ programmer, this gives a lot of insight to how programming was in the early 90s/late 80s. The commenting work is also very good! Learned some stuff I never knew about Windows.

This makes people appreciate 4k demoscene intros even more.

Love the Steve Gibson call-out.

Fascinating content, and Dave’s typing sounds like white noise since it’s so fast. That’s decades of time spent at a keyboard on display. Thanks for creating this!

You're a machine Dave. I've coding for 15 years and I can't still code that fast... impressive.

Health nut: "I ran a 4K yesterday." Dave: "Oh, what did it do? Health nut: wha?

I love the soothing piano music in the background

I remember a pretty "big" collection of assembly widgets that didn't do much but were very amusing. The zip was found on most software repositories and it was out there to show what you could do with some seriously small bits of code. This was right before the big software bloat era.

I love to watch a master at work, machinist, electritians, carpet layers, roofers ect. Most of this is so far over my head. the peak of my programing was a basic program to calculate the length of a bicycle spoke, took me a week. I got clear through this and hold you in awe!