Comment by xorvoid
3 years ago
It’s written in x86-16 real mode because all immediates are smaller and switching to 32-bit mode takes a fair amount of code.
I would have preferred 32-bit mode because real mode is awkward with its seg:off addressing scheme.
Using the bios functions just allows it to have “not-boring” examples easily.
That's true, but it's still a sort of library dependency. Even for very tiny computers with a lot of hardware assistance, the basic ROM for communicating with the world in a useful way is bigger.