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Comment by mwkaufma

10 hours ago

"Assembly is Brutal"

Counterpoint: I picked it up in high school and I was Not That Bright(tm).

Certainly, some complex instruction-set extensions or sprawling SIMD mnemonics are more challenging that what I was reading in the 90s, but the boogie-man status of assembly is greatly overstated.

The final thesis, that we can-and-should let LLMs micro-optimize assembly into non-statically-verifiable gibberish to save an instruction stacks misunderstandings on top of misunderstandings. Just vapid gold-rush cheer-leading from Wired.

Re your counterpoint, learning to write small extremely toy programs in assembly isn’t hard. But using it to write bug-free programs with non-trivial functionality is much more difficult.

  • Generally, people aren't writing programs with non-trivial functionality in assembly; they're writing very small, hyper optimized functions that get called by some higher level language.

    • Exactly ^^^ I taught myself assembly on my Commodore 64. However, I only used it for certain tasks that were suboptimal with Commodore's BASIC and 64K of RAM.

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  • Yeah it's all shit and giggles until you need to allocate memory and handle it. Or when you need to use vector instructions or some CPU-specific stuff. Then you start understanding why people call it nightmarish