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> I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything. Well... modern assembly is monst
by avaer 9y ago
> I've always loved assembly, since it gives you the bare minimum of concepts and tooling from which you can build everything.
Well... modern assembly is monstrously complex. Probably more so than your favorite high level programming language. Modern assembly is generally not a bare minimum, because it's designed to give compilers the interface to run code fast, not to be easy to program by people.
And WebAssembly is a bit of a misnomer since it's not quite your processor's assembly; it's designed to be assembled fast on the client side, while also being memory-safe. Ironically that makes it simpler than actual assembly.
- fasquoika 9y agoIt sounds like you're assuming they were talking about x86 when they didn't actually specify...
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoI learned assembly with an 8086 emulator, and I've had the pleasure of writing assembly for bare-metal ARM microcontrollers. But you're right, modern x86 assembly is a whole different beast. I've tried looking through their manuals, but as I recall their manuals are largely unapproachable +3000 page tomes. My comment was written with the 8086 emulator in mind. It was great because you could view what was in each register, as well as the inspect any section of memory.