I went to college for Microbiology and became a programmer on my own after, so nope, never written a single line in assembly and never thought of checking it out either. Just never really crossed my mind. I might start messing with it soon.
Go for it, if it’s to satisfy your own curiosity, but there’s virtually no practical use for it these days. I had a personal interest in it at uni, and a project involving coding in assembly for an imaginary processor was a small part of one optional CS course. Over the years I’ve dabbled with asm for 32-bit Intel PCs and various retro consoles; at the moment I’m writing something for the Atari 2600.
In the past, assembly was useful for squeezing performance out of low-powered and embedded systems, but now that “embedded” includes SoCs with clock speeds in the hundreds of MHz and several megabytes of RAM, and optimizing compilers have improved greatly, the tiny potential performance gain (and you have to be very good at it before you’ll be able to match or do better than most optimizing compilers) is almost always outweighed by the overhead of hand-writing and maintaining assembly language.
If you’re curious, I recommend this channel. It often delves deep into the code to explain stuff, as well as how the hardware works. Really fascinating!
I went to college for Microbiology and became a programmer on my own after, so nope, never written a single line in assembly and never thought of checking it out either. Just never really crossed my mind. I might start messing with it soon.
I… Don’t recommend it. Rust if anything.
It’s a neat party trick? Helps you understand how a processor works? But for anything modern, it’s way more work than it’s worth.
Go for it, if it’s to satisfy your own curiosity, but there’s virtually no practical use for it these days. I had a personal interest in it at uni, and a project involving coding in assembly for an imaginary processor was a small part of one optional CS course. Over the years I’ve dabbled with asm for 32-bit Intel PCs and various retro consoles; at the moment I’m writing something for the Atari 2600.
In the past, assembly was useful for squeezing performance out of low-powered and embedded systems, but now that “embedded” includes SoCs with clock speeds in the hundreds of MHz and several megabytes of RAM, and optimizing compilers have improved greatly, the tiny potential performance gain (and you have to be very good at it before you’ll be able to match or do better than most optimizing compilers) is almost always outweighed by the overhead of hand-writing and maintaining assembly language.
If you’re curious, I recommend this channel. It often delves deep into the code to explain stuff, as well as how the hardware works. Really fascinating!
This is a very interesting channel. Thank you