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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?

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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:

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