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How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

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Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#21

Post by cogman10 »

le-mark wrote: post #18

This 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 compil…

I've always had a deep interest for it, but the more I learn about what and how compilers can do stuff, the more I'm like "Ok, better just let the compiler handle it".

It's truly wild how much a modern compiler can transform code. There are circumstances where a human can do better (mostly around SIMD optimizations) but those require you to be in situations where you doing operations on large arrays of numbers. Not extremely common in most programming (beyond maybe making totals. Which is a SIMD operation that compilers do well).

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#22

Post by ngcc_hk »

Still enjoying this assembly

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45646958

I guess it would be nice to have a more entry level piece not just a more advanced stuff and a story. Still nice. But not that involved and getting into IT is more than involvement and interaction.

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#24

Post by t-3 »

shevy-java wrote: post #19

I 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.

Assembly is often easier than using programming languages, it's just less convenient most of the time. x86 will make you think you're too stupid to understand because it is a disgusting malformed monster. Assembly on other architectures make the computer feel like a machine rather than a magic box.

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#25

Post by xgkickt »

le-mark wrote: post #18

This 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 compil…

For me MIPS is the best ISA for “stream of consciousness” assembly, you can just write it then tidy up the register usage and pipelining after.

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#26

Post by JKCalhoun »

Ben Eater delves into 6502 assembly with regard to his bread-board 6502 computer. I recommend anyone interested in assembly do a search (on YouTube) for his series.

I got one of his kits and assembled it while working through his YouTube series.

(I didn't, at the time, continue very far into the assembly course, but perhaps will this Winter when I am hunkered down in the Midwaste with the blizzards beating down on my home.)

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#27

Post by JKCalhoun »

Tangentially related. I want to play around with Web Assembly just to try to speed up (or perhaps parallelize) my own implementation of the "ray casting" "voxel" algorithm that the author demonstrates from the old Comanche game.

My straight Javascript implementation: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Mooncraft2000

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#28

Post by michaelcampbell »

whobre wrote: post #23

Wonderful article! Programming 68000 assembly is a joy. People are quick to dismiss CISC instruction sets because they mostly encounter x64 with its baggage of legacy, but 68k is something else.

I remember reading Lance Levanthal's 68000 book and doing some toy exercises as my first kind of non-uni assy experience; then when I got to college some IBM 360. When I finally saw x86, omg what a nightmare.

Re: How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly

#29

Post by rramadass »

endorphine wrote: post #15

Where would you suggest someone starts if they want to get into this stuff? Start writing an emulator? Which one would you recommend?

Low-Level Programming: C, Assembly, and Program Execution on Intel x86-64 Architecture by Igor Zhirkov.
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