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

CommunityNews
ABSTRACT In lieu of a traditional , I’ve tried to distill the essence of the talk into a collection of maxims: All programmers are API ...
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
New
CommunityNews
Building GitHub with Ruby and Rails | The GitHub Blog. Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the app...
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
First poster: dyowee
olmOCR is an open-source tool for converting PDFs to text with high accuracy, preserving reading order and supporting tables, equations, ...
New
CommunityNews
The French originated the meter in the 1790s as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian thr...
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
CommunityNews
After six months of hard work, I’m thrilled to announce the general availability of Sidekiq 8.0! :partying_face::tada: Status Sidekiq is...
New
CommunityNews
Online multiplayer games, such as Gears of War and Halo, use skill-based matchmaking to give players fair and enjoyable matches. They dep...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Free and open source software is the default choice for the technologies that run our world, and it’s built and maintained by people like...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Design and develop sophisticated 2D games that are as much fun to make as they are to play. From particle effects and pathfinding to soci...
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
New
mindriot
Ok, well here are some thoughts and opinions on some of the ergonomic keyboards I have, I guess like mini review of each that I use enoug...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use advanced functional programming principles, practical Domain-Driven Design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scal...
New