Comment by shireboy
5 years ago
It seems like it would be really hard to be productive developing large projects in Assembly. Adding features/bug and security fixes seems like they would be very time consuming. What are the advantages of going this low level vs C or similar?
Speed
Mental challenge
Of which only the mental challenge is a given. Higher language compilers are steadily (still, after all those years) improving with no end in sight. Are your assembly programming skills? Are you rewriting old code with recently learned tricks? And once a superoptimizer is used, it's game over for hand assembly.
I mean, sure, but probably most programs we use these days are written in Javascript/DOM and gratuitously interface with remote systems. It demonstrably isn't difficult to write decent assembly that is faster than the naive RESTful APIs called by Javascript that makes our 8 core 2-5 GHz computers feel slower than a wet week. A system written entirely in assembly is probably going to be significantly faster than a modern general purpose computer, but it probably won't be running checking your work webmail any time soon.
Someone needs to write those tools, why do you think sites like https://godbolt.org/ exist?