A preview of the future Intel Architecture documentation

10 points by bakkot 17 hours ago on lobsters | 10 comments

[OP] bakkot | 15 hours ago

Same author, notably! (Alastair Reid.)

Oh, I suspected that! But I deleted the part of my comment where I observed that he has been at Intel for 5 years (and blogged a little on this topic since then) because I didn’t spot a clear indication of which Intel staff are involved… (I should have looked at the GitHub repo!)

[OP] bakkot | 13 hours ago

Yeah it's surprisingly hard to find. I saw his name from the associated blog posts.

Thanks for the pointer! I’m enjoying the thoughts on designing a language for readability so that nonspecialist programmers can understand Intel’s instruction set architecture specification.

tuxes | 6 hours ago

The original link of that post is broken.

Archived copy: https://archive.is/9dPsI

Whoops, I thought I checked that … but you can scroll through his blog index to find https://alastairreid.github.io/ARM-v8a-xml-release/

abeyer | 12 hours ago

I'm really not much a fan of burying documentation text behind a bunch of js navigation... seems to counter the goal "It is a webpage to promote easier searching and exploration."

Further made worse by weird markup in the navigation that makes the mouse cursor behavior inconsistent and not aligned with normal web behavior.

[OP] bakkot | 17 hours ago

The interesting (to me) bit:

The behavior of instructions and helper functions is described in a new specification language that enables us to test the specification which makes the specification more precise and accurate.

I like the specification, but I would prefer to have it available as a PDF. Or at least plain, js-free HTML, if they really must.