I came across this post that discusses ways to write FizzBuzz in Clojure without using conditionals. However, most if not all of the solutions still do a lot of branching behind the scenes. Think of hash lookups for example.

So I asked to myself, how can I write a FizzBuzz solution with no branches at all? Probably not in Clojure; you can’t easily tell where it is branching or not.

The only way to be absolutely sure is to write it in assembly. So I did. I never did assembly before, so it might be terrible code.

I used an array of 15 pointers to either “fizz”, “buzz”, “fizzbuzz”, or a number buffer. I then filled the number buffer with the current number in ascii and printed whatever I get from the array.

One thing I struggeled with is how to stop. At first I had one condition to see if I reached 100. Now I use a lookup table that calls sys_time 99 times and then sys_exit .

section . data f db "fizz " b db "buzz " fb db "fizzbuzz" n db 10 ; newline string cycle dq num , num , f , num , b , f , num , num , f , b , num , f , num , num , fb callid dq 13 , 1 ; sys_time, sys_exit section . bss num resb 8 ; number buffer section . text global _start print : ;write rcx mov rax , 4 ;sys_write mov rbx , 1 ;stdout mov rdx , 8 int 0x80 ret newline : ;write newline mov rax , 4 ;sys_write mov rbx , 1 ;stdout mov rcx , n mov rdx , 1 int 0x80 ret itoa : ;convert rax to str mov byte [ num + 1 ] , 0x30 mov rdx , 0 mov rcx , 10 div rcx add [ num + 1 ] , rdx mov byte [num], 0x30 mov rdx , 0 mov rcx , 10 div rcx add [num], rdx ret _start : mov r12 , 0 hundredtimes : ; initialise number buffer mov rax , r12 inc rax call itoa ; mod 15 the number mov rax , r12 mov rdx , 0 mov rcx , 15 div rcx ; look up the number in cycle ; prints the num buffer or any of the strings mov rcx , [ cycle + rdx * 8 ] call print call newline ; next... inc r12 ; devide the number by 100 mov rax , r12 mov rdx , 0 mov rcx , 100 div rcx ; get the time or exit mov rax , [ callid + rax * 8 ] int 0x80 ; jump to the top of the loop jmp hundredtimes

To compile on a 64 bit machine: