That’s a fair comment. I suppose I was just documenting my own journey. Before this project I’d written a lot of C and Assembly (albeit not Arm64), but I’d never used make, or a cross-compiler (or git for that matter!). I wrote about what was new to me, originally with the aim of not forgetting, and then later with the aim of helping others who might be in a similar place. I’m sorry if it was irksome in places - I’m learning too :)
Hey, don't take that too hard. I'm actually in tge midst of an LFS build centered on the raspi4, with shaded of learning to write boot code as well, and you can bet I'm scouring everything you wrote.
No one can ever learn anything if no one writes this type of stuff down. sometimes the network of knowledge and laying out the precise line of questions to answer is the best way of charting out and communicating info for learners.
You’re very welcome :) I owe the Internet’s vast array of content creators a debt of gratitude for teaching me so much. Even those that sent me down the wrong path - it was invariably a data point that helped me to move on…
Small suggestion that I’ve found works great: rather than rewrite the content (which I somewhat agree is tedious to skim over, but wouldn’t have commented like GP, when you know it already), link to the sources you used when learning yourself. Not only does it save you and the reader time, it also works as a handy log of the sources when you need to go back and look up a detail.
I've stated in part1 of the tutorial that "This tutorial is not intended to teach you how to code in assembly language or C".
My goal was to demonstrate some basic principles to get code running on bare metal, encourage curiosity, further my own knowledge and document my findings.
I appreciate that more self-documenting code might be desirable, but to some people (me included) a large number of lines can be as off-putting as more esoteric syntax. I acknowledge, however, that it is very hard to please everyone!
Hi! Thank you for writing and publishing this project! Just to clarify: no part of my critique was aimed at you or your choices in this codebase. My main point is that unlike the original commenter in this thread, i believe that well written C is not as clear and simple as well written rust (or other modern languages). I then tried to back that up by cherry picking a random line of “c-like” code from your codebase. My beef is with C, not you or anybody else using it :)
That makes complete sense, and I don’t take it personally. It’s been so cool to read all this valuable feedback!
I must say that I’m very comfortable in C, only because it’s where I landed up as a kid. I actually find it way less confusing than more “modern” languages (I kinda skipped OO etc.!), and I enjoy the “control” it gives. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks after all! ;-)
No problem. I’ve been looking into bare metal runtimes for ARM chips, and when I chanced upon this thought it was too much of a gem not to be posted here. :)
