4 ms·

Assembly is one of those things that is feared by so many engineers, but is actually incredibly accessible. Whenever I find an excuse to drop down to assembly m

Assembly is one of those things that is feared by so many engineers, but is actually incredibly accessible. Whenever I find an excuse to drop down to assembly my colleagues have looked at me like I'm a wizard with 3 heads. The tooling to debug, dump or inspect, or to link or otherwise glue bits of assembly together has existed for decades. It's all right there!

RicoElectrico 2y ago
It's one of these areas LLMs really help to get started. Not much invention needed, but quite involved setup if you don't know what you're precisely looking for. Having them spit out boilerplate and needed invocations lowers the barrier substantially.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  Assuming you have a C compiler, you should use C to get basic boilerplate and use asm or volatile asm to drop down to assembly level. This is true for GPUs, CPUs like x86 and ARM, and more. Only on the smallest of embedded systems like AVR with 4kB RAM have I ever found dropping to raw assembly to be useful. Bonus points: input/output/clobbers works well with the GCC and CLang optimizers. Though it's not intuitive how compilers can still move your assembly around, it's surprisingly full featured for how to get info into and out of registers. There are rare times where the C boilerplate is counterproductive. I guess OS level setup is another spot where raw non-C assembly is useful.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    Intrinsics, when available, are a convenient tool. But even then, I think assembly these days has very limited applications and most programmers don't need to know any assembly to be effective. Preemptive disclaimer: all my jobs were the exception to the rule and I sadly had to work with various assembly languages on a daily basis. Still not a fan.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      You should be able to read assembly, not least because understanding what's generated by the compiler or jit is pretty important to performance optimization.
      - david-gpu 2y ago
        Aren't there many other steps with better bang for your buck to be done before that? Libraries, better algorithms and data structures, parallelism, etc.
        AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Reading assembly, like compiler explorer or in a debugger.
        david-gpu 2y ago
        Yes, I understand. But the only way that gives you good bang for your buck is if you have already exhausted a number of other areas earlier. I.e. it is marginal gains. How many programmers out there would be better served by spending time learning more about those other areas before they even start thinking about whether the compiler is generating slightly suboptimal assembly?
        boris-smidt 2y ago
        I suspect it depends, when you would write a yaml/json parser you can only change the algorithm up to a point. After that you will have to start doing some bit fiddling and then being able to see the assembly can be really valuable.
        david-gpu 2y ago
        How many programmers write a YAML/JSON parser vs. use an existing library? How many of the ones who write their own parser would benefit from using a library more than from reading assembly? If your answer is that: "well, the ones writing the library benefit from learning assembly"... Think about what percentage of programmers they represent. Not to mention that source-level profiling will still give them better bang for their buck. As somebody who has read a ton of assembly in their career because those marginal gains mattered: 99% of programmers are better off investing their time elsewhere.
dist1ll 2y ago
I agree it's unnecessarily feared. At its core, it lacks a lot of complexity. But actually writing asm is an experience straight from the 80s. Compared to modern languages, the tooling is simply antiquated. I noticed this once I started writing larger sections of asm at a time. It's "fine" in the same sense that writing makefiles is "fine" - it becomes a PITA after a certain size. I think there's lots to improve on the current state of asm, but it's just too niche. The only power users I know are hobbyists working on operating systems and games for retro hardware.
- boris-smidt 2y ago
  Also add cryptographical people to that list. A friend of mine told me that they create 'constant' time algorithms. These have to written in assembly otherwise the compiler will try to speed up the algorithm. But then you can theoretically measure the execution time of encrypting and reverse engineer the possible keys.

RicoElectrico 2y ago

It's one of these areas LLMs really help to get started. Not much invention needed, but quite involved setup if you don't know what you're precisely looking for. Having them spit out boilerplate and needed invocations lowers the barrier substantially.

dragontamer 2y ago
Assuming you have a C compiler, you should use C to get basic boilerplate and use asm or volatile asm to drop down to assembly level. This is true for GPUs, CPUs like x86 and ARM, and more. Only on the smallest of embedded systems like AVR with 4kB RAM have I ever found dropping to raw assembly to be useful. Bonus points: input/output/clobbers works well with the GCC and CLang optimizers. Though it's not intuitive how compilers can still move your assembly around, it's surprisingly full featured for how to get info into and out of registers. There are rare times where the C boilerplate is counterproductive. I guess OS level setup is another spot where raw non-C assembly is useful.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  Intrinsics, when available, are a convenient tool. But even then, I think assembly these days has very limited applications and most programmers don't need to know any assembly to be effective. Preemptive disclaimer: all my jobs were the exception to the rule and I sadly had to work with various assembly languages on a daily basis. Still not a fan.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    You should be able to read assembly, not least because understanding what's generated by the compiler or jit is pretty important to performance optimization.
    - david-gpu 2y ago
      Aren't there many other steps with better bang for your buck to be done before that? Libraries, better algorithms and data structures, parallelism, etc.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Reading assembly, like compiler explorer or in a debugger.
        david-gpu 2y ago
        Yes, I understand. But the only way that gives you good bang for your buck is if you have already exhausted a number of other areas earlier. I.e. it is marginal gains. How many programmers out there would be better served by spending time learning more about those other areas before they even start thinking about whether the compiler is generating slightly suboptimal assembly?
      - boris-smidt 2y ago
        I suspect it depends, when you would write a yaml/json parser you can only change the algorithm up to a point. After that you will have to start doing some bit fiddling and then being able to see the assembly can be really valuable.
        david-gpu 2y ago
        How many programmers write a YAML/JSON parser vs. use an existing library? How many of the ones who write their own parser would benefit from using a library more than from reading assembly? If your answer is that: "well, the ones writing the library benefit from learning assembly"... Think about what percentage of programmers they represent. Not to mention that source-level profiling will still give them better bang for their buck. As somebody who has read a ton of assembly in their career because those marginal gains mattered: 99% of programmers are better off investing their time elsewhere.

dist1ll 2y ago

I agree it's unnecessarily feared. At its core, it lacks a lot of complexity. But actually writing asm is an experience straight from the 80s. Compared to modern languages, the tooling is simply antiquated. I noticed this once I started writing larger sections of asm at a time. It's "fine" in the same sense that writing makefiles is "fine" - it becomes a PITA after a certain size. I think there's lots to improve on the current state of asm, but it's just too niche. The only power users I know are hobbyists working on operating systems and games for retro hardware.

boris-smidt 2y ago
Also add cryptographical people to that list. A friend of mine told me that they create 'constant' time algorithms. These have to written in assembly otherwise the compiler will try to speed up the algorithm. But then you can theoretically measure the execution time of encrypting and reverse engineer the possible keys.