In Java would you consider TransferQueue as poor mans channel for producer consumer scenario?

public TransferQueue<byte[]> subscribe(String topicName) {...}

The idea behind TransferQueue is very similar to async chans

But TransferQueue has no buffer so it will just block unless there’s a free consumer available to do the work

TransferQueue does have a buffer doesn't it?

the transfer operation will have those semantics, but you can also put or offer without that

(and SynchronousQueue is unbuffered like an unbuffered chan)

Oh sorry, I confused TransferQueue with SynchronousQueue

does anyone know of a text that approaches assembly in a clear and engaging way that would compare to SICP, or On Lisp or the K+R C book or Joy of Clojure or Elements of Clojure? I want to learn ARM assembly (for fun / art purposes and hey ARM is more and more relevant lately), but want to at least have a high quality book on it

I am eagerly hoping someone has a good reply because I would be very interested in that as well!

maybe it's a book I'll need to attempt to write LOL, but surely someone has attempted it by now, probably one of the first gen of CS masters

this might be what I was looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming

Ah. some light reading

Every single assembly language is different so I don't know that there's enough "competition" to have anything more than a reference manual for a specific chipset?

I really liked 6502 Programming (I think that's the title) from decades ago.

right - but k+r informed how I write java and c++, I think assemblies have at least that much commonality

or at least RISC ones...

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-6502-Rodnay-Zaks/dp/0895880466 (from 1980). I still have a print copy somewhere.

so you recommend it?

I should pull it out and double check that I'm not just remembering it with rose-tinted glasses...

OK, yeah. I paid ten pounds, 25 p for it in the early '80s. The price is hand-written on the inside front leaf, in pencil 🙂

It starts off with the basics of binary and stuff, then looks at the hardware organization and chip instructions. It discusses addressing modes etc. Then it gets into actual application programming with assembly.

What sort of level are you at with assembler/machine-level stuff right now @noisesmith?

I understand things like calling conventions, registers, load, store, conditional branching, the basic add / overflow kind of stuff

what I don't have is the ability to translate that into understanding a dumped procedure, or follow the code and see bugs clearly

(that might translate to "beginner but not absolute beginner")

a fun end goal would be to understand and improve the ARM instructions produced by JVM JIT

(I've heard a rumor that there isn't a quality hotspot for ARM)

@noisesmith sounds like you might do better with an ARM-specific book at this point. $40 is a lot to drop on an "antique" (but I still have great fondness for the 6502 processor 🙂 )

the biggest appeal I could see there is that game-boy has sound and video generation available, and you can write code for it using 6502 there are some "cool kids" who make dance music that way, and that could be fun

but there are even more arm devices out there, with even better audio and graphics capability :D

I haven't done any assembler stuff since the early '90s at this point. I did a lot of it before then. 6502, 68000, 8080, 8086, IBM 8100, some VM 370 stuff... SPARC, 88000 (Motorola, when it was still designated the 78000)...

...I started with PRIME assembler at university (PRIME had four different assembler dialects)

The 6502 is a lovely thing. Few years ago I helped my friend implement a pacman clone on a Commodore vic-20. I do music, he needed the intro song code. I was given a "budget" of 80 bytes (yes, bytes) for the music data, and player code. I did it in 64 bytes. 🤓 Coding those machines is such a different world. Very fun.

Oh, gameboy and NES are so fascinating to me, they are so terribly bad computers, but nintendo did manage to put sizeable games on them. I don’t know, I find it fascinating how the hardware dictates the games they could run, and if you kept within those boundaries, you could make fun games on a machine that could do almost nothing

well, by todays standards that is

(if this fascinates you too, there is a nice explanation of the SNES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ibhDU2SAI )