2 ms·
> It's very common for people to learn assembly using x86(-64) but this ISA is so messy, complicated and layered that it always seems like the bad choice to me.
by josteink 6y ago
> It's very common for people to learn assembly using x86(-64) but this ISA is so messy, complicated and layered that it always seems like the bad choice to me.
Agreed. As someone who did lots of assembly for the 6502 and the whole Motorola 68k series CPUs while on Mac & Commodore-machines, I thought I might as well learn x86 assembly when I moved to "regular" PCs.
After a week or so of en-bafflement, I just decided that dealing with assembly on any sort of regular basis was not something I was interested in doing on the Intel-platform.
It was inferior to competing platforms in almost every conceivable way back then (except performance) and it haven't improved since. It's just utterly terrible and the only reason it's still around is backwards compatibility. Nobody would design anything like this today.
- stevekemp 6y agoIt really depends what you started with - I've never touched 6502, but I did a lot of z80 assembly back in the day. Since Zilog was started by ex-Intel people there's a lot in common. For me jumping from z80 -> x86 was only a small change. The same notion of paired-registers and very similar instructions made it a simple enough change. Of course these days there have been a lot of changes, but the basics are still basic, albeit idiosyncratic.