3 ms·

Writing assembly isn't portable. Windows NT 3.1-4 ran on MIPS, PowerPC, and more. Intel was coming out with new instruction sets all the time.

• codeflo 4y ago
  Not sure why you mention Intel extending their instruction set, the addition of stuff like SIMD never changed the behavior of anything that existed before. Very few programs ran on non-x86 back then anyway. Some people used to argue that writing assembly is more portable than using OS functions. I’m not saying I fully agree with that view, but it’s a discussion one can reasonably have.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    Intel was constantly adding new instructions which could be more performant. Inline assembly can never take advantages of that; compilers or OS functions can
    • codeflo 4y ago
      To be clear I understand you correctly, you think there was a chance that Intel would add a CPU instruction that is "more performant" than ADD? In fact, significantly so, to the extent that this would justify the overhead of a dynamically linked function call? Do I understand you correctly? (BTW, this is exactly the kind of argument people made in defense of left-pad, which in my view completely validates my analogy.)