Honestly, Assembly is great. It's the most closer-to-the-metal, no-nonsense, raw experience you can get. The problem is that means it's also tedious and error-prone to write, but the elegant simplicity of the abstraction is still there.
How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
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Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#12I had an Atari 1040 ST and I used to love programming it in 68000 assembler mostly using K-Seka. It really felt like programming a 32 bit CPU which was amazing after the 8 bit world that preceeded it. The instruction set was very orthogonal (other than the slightly odd split between A registers and D registers). When I graduated from 68000 assembly to ARM assembly it felt like a natural progression.
Probably my best project was a FORTH system. It used direct threading so each FORTH word was a proper assembly routine. It had primitive peephole optimization too! It was all written in 68000 assembler with K-Seka.
So if you want an assembler to learn, 68000 is a great choice. However you could learn 32 bit ARM which I came to prefer and that will still run on modern systems (at least if they have been compiled with 32 bit support or on the plentiful ARM microcontrollers).
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#13Am I the only one who won’t click on links to something on medium.com?
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#14It is a very encouraging message.
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#15Where would you suggest someone starts if they want to get into this stuff? Start writing an emulator? Which one would you recommend?
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#16Where would you suggest someone starts if they want to get into this stuff? Start writing an emulator? Which one would you recommend?
A chip8 emulator
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#17Am I the only one who won’t click on links to something on medium.com?
Replace medium.com with scribe.rip in the URL
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#18This article is less about assembly programming and more a tour de force on retro game development for the Atari ST. The author talks about using inline assembler to optimize gfx and game rendering inner loops. Oh and the author ported Doom to the Atari ST.
Some people are drawn to assembly and that’s great. Me personally, after a course in undergrad studying MIPS assembly, I learned to appreciate what all the compiler does for us and moved on!
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#19I want to like it but my brain is too feeble for it.
I will wait for when efficiency (as well as speed) comes from elegance in the programming language itself rather than the human mind having to cater to some fundamental archaic syntax.
Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
#20I want to like it but my brain is too feeble for it. I will wait for when efficiency (as well as speed) comes from elegance in the programming language itself rather than the human mind having to cater to some fundamental archaic syntax.
The thing about assembly is, in a limited context it's not that hard to understand at all.
Value goes into register, do some math on register, compare register to immediate, etc.
The difficulty comes the more code you add. The same thing happens in nearly any language. A single file python script is easy, the complexity in a mature async python app is hard. It's easy to add some numbers and val >> stout in c++, but managing all the dependencies and build chain is hard in a million line program.
It's no different, but assembly is neat because you can isolate the complexity via inlining and just step back and tell the computer exactly what to do.