CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Can you tell an assembly language when you see one?

Assembly programming is nowadays seen as niche at best. And more often than not as needlessly meticulous, demanding, and wasteful even for its niches.

Assembly is hard. It is unfriendly. Programming in assembly language is slow and error-prone. This is conventional wisdom.

Unfortunately, these days this wisdom is mostly nurtured by people who have little or no idea of what modern assembly languages look like. Assembly programming didn’t stay in the 50s, it evolved along with high-level languages incorporating structural, functional, and objective-oriented programming elements. It plays well with modern APIs and DOMs. It is, of course, conceptually low-level but you can build rather high-level abstractions on top of it as well.

In fact, I’m not even sure that anyone can easily tell assembly code from some high-level code without googling. Can you?

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

I was writing assembly for the 6502 processor (Apple II and similar computers) back between 1993 and 1996 but truthfully, I don’t care about it at all these days.

Compilers can handle it. Plus there are some super strange gotchas a human couldn’t easily deduce, like it’s actually faster to XOR a register on itself to set it to zero, compared to just… you know, setting it zero directly?

After I stumbled upon several such dysfunctional peculiarities, I gave up.

dwaynebradley

dwaynebradley

I played around with 6502 assembly back around 1985-86 while in high school and just went “nope, nope, nope!” :joy: I am really glad that there are folks out there that DO want to dig down at that level though and build it into the compilers that we get to use every day so a HUGE thank you to those folks! 🙇🏻‍♂

dwaynebradley

dwaynebradley

1000% with you on this one :joy:

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: bot
FUZIX FUZIX is a fusion of various elements from the assorted UZI forks and branches beaten together into some kind of semi-coherent pla...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
On Wednesday last week, Google’s Fiona Cicconi wrote to company employees. She announced that Google was bringing forward its timetable ...
New
First poster: mafinar
F# Is The Best Coding Language Today. If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New
CommunityNews
GitHub - livekit/livekit: Scalable, high-performance WebRTC SFU. SDKs in JavaScript, React, React Native, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, Unity/C...
New
First poster: bot
Apple’s Tim Cook to take 50% pay hit after shareholder feedback. ‘Target compensation’ for CEO down from $99.4m in 2022 to an expected $...
New
First poster: bot
Rewrite it in Rust by ridiculousfish · Pull Request #9512 · fish-shell/fish-shell. (Sorry for the meme; also this is obligatory.) I thi...
New
First poster: bot
[js/web] WebGPU backend via JSEP by fs-eire · Pull Request #14579 · microsoft/onnxruntime. Description This change introduced the follo...
New
First poster: joeb
GitHub - crablang/crab: A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100...
New
First poster: fullstackplus
Why Python is terrible… Nice language, but unsuitable for most professional purposes
New
First poster: braycarla
In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmar...
New

Other popular topics Top

New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
DevotionGeo
I have always used antique keyboards like Cherry MX 1800 or Cherry MX 8100 and almost always have modified the switches in some way, like...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Get the comprehensive, insider information you need for Rails 8 with the new edition of this award-winning classic. Sam Ruby @rubys ...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Explore the power of Ash Framework by modeling and building the domain for a real-world web application. Rebecca Le @sevenseacat and ...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New