Is it possible to develop directly in Assembler within the current Haiku Alpha release? Which are the tools / compilers to be used for that?
P.S.: does that Assembler also support German umlaut symbols in comments or labels?
Hello! 
First of all, what do you mean by “developing directly in assembly”?
Do you mean to create GUI applications in assembly?
I believe Alpha 4.1 has yasm.
– louisdem
Imagine a Chess program consisting of a GUI and an intelligent engine, which is merely a command line tool. That engine could be written in Assembler language, what sometimes might make sense. To write a GUI via Assembler indeed doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
“To write a GUI via Assembler indeed doesn’t seem to be a good idea.”
It’s amazing what can be done with a simple framebuffer. But, assembly code will never be the way-to-go for things like big apps, Aside from the obvious reasons, very few people could maintain the code. Ever tried Menuet? BLAZINGLY fast, but no apps. Well, relatively speaking. It does have some internet capability, but I’m not endorsing it or recommending it. It seems that keeping a Chromium style browser up to date on such a system would be a life endeavor.
You can compile both yasm and nasm on Haiku without much problems. On the nightlies we have recipes and packages for both.
You write the engine for KI in assembler? You can create your GUI with yab 
http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/development/editors/unofficial-yab-17-fixed-paste-error-of-textedit
Or if you have interest to learn a “new” language try EGSL: http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/development/games/egsl-160
IDE: http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/development/ides/egsl-ide
Games: http://www.haikuware.com/directory/search
Writing a Chess engine in C++ is nothing new to me. Have a look on my pages: http://www.10x8.net/home/Computerschach.html
But I am thinking about to rewrite it in an optimized way using Assembler for some parts. But there is a need for a reliable OS and stably recommended development tools.
On the base of nightlies I would not develop anything.
You can also write the engine in C/C++, plus it would be easier to maintain than assembly - unless you’re an assembly code-monkey 
Maybe even in python.
Explore the possibilities. Try the nightlies too.
– louisdem
Well then, yasm is what we used for Alpha 4. It should compile out of the box on Haiku and I think there is an optional package for it.
We switched to nasm again because it now supports some newer instructions that yasm doesn’t have. Nasm should also compile out of the box on Haiku and work well, it was what we used before switching to yasm.
It’s just that you’ll have to compile them yourself, instead of relying on existing packages&recipes. Or you can always wait for alpha5