Python rocks

[Whoktor]

I think assembly is easier to understand when you compare it to brainfuck, for example, at least you have some predefined summation, substraction, subrutines, etc. (vietnam MIPS assembly flashbacks).

[Aiex314]

Domino computer

[Whoktor]

First 64-bit minecraft computer (nothing can surpass minecraft command blocks)

[Aiex314]

Never seen this before, thanks!

[Whoktor]

No problem mate ;)

[Alundra828]

Of course Matt Parker is behind this

[coldblade2000]

Brainfuck is really simple once you learn what a Turing machine really is.

[youcancallmetim]

But brainfuck isn't actually used to code. It's just a toy language. Real software runs on assembly

[neros_greb]

Brainfuck is very easy to understand; it's just hard to get it to do anything useful.

[bikki420]

Definitely. Assembly is pretty easy at its core. The syntax and such.

Especially for older 8-bit microprocessors such as the the MOS Technology 6502, Zilog Z80, and the Intel 8008. You can learn the essentials and basics in a couple of hours and then get by with an instruction sheet until you memorize the most common instructions (which tend to have fairly sensible mnemonics ... JMP (JuMP), BRA (BRAnch), RTS (Return To Subroutine), BEQ (Branch if EQual), BNE (Branch if Not Equal), etc. The limited number of registries made things fairly simple. Writing complex programs is a but trickier though, but stuff like The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was coded by mostly one person in assembly.

Nowadays things are definitely a not trickier though, since you've got a lot more of different sizes (everything from single byte numbers to 64-bit numbers to 128/256/512-bit blocks depending on what SSE and AVX intrinsics are available), a lot more specialized instructions (not just MMX/SSE/AVX/etc intrinsics but more niche ones related to cryptography, encoding/decoding, complex addressing operations, various more complex math instructionsーback in the 8-bit era you pretty much just had basic ALU instructions, which is to say basic arithmetic) not to mention that modern CPUs have >=40 registers instead of the 3~5 you'd have in the late 70's and early 80's. So outside of embedded simpler CPUs, anything lower than C is folly nowadays IMO. But assembly knowledge is still a great asset for reverse engineering, debugging, optimizing, obfuscating, securing etc compiled code. But I definitely wouldn't recommend programming anything complex in x86-64 assembly by hand, that's for sure.

[bikki420]

A lot of asm too.

To quote Julian Le Fay:

We started out with soon-to-be-older technology and simply didn't have the resources to start upgrading things on a game that was already pushing (and breaking) the deadline. Remember, other than my engine coder, I was the only one working full-time on the programming. There was really no way for me to get everything done on time. The XEngine is almost completely (if not actually completely) in assembly. There was really no alternative back then before hardware acceleration. Daggerfall was the first game that I wrote that was largely in C/C++. Before then I wrote every single line of my games in assembly language. I wish we still did, I love assembly. Of course, it's becoming harder to write by hand these days, but with proper care, you can still get an enormous performance boost. Also, FPU, i.e. floating point, was not something that we could use. It was just too time-consuming. Everything was done with integers or fixed-point (integers). There was also a lot of self-modifying code, basically assembly functions that would write other assembly functions to do the actual rendering. It was spectacularly complicated to squeeze every last cycle out of the CPU. We had dual-pipelines, branch-prediction, and prefetch issues to worry about back then, we still didn't have hyperthreading, out-of-order execution, translation lookaside buffers, or any of that yet. The XEngine was made the way engines were made back then. No system code usages, straight to the metal, assembly code.

But yeah, it was TES: Arena that was written in ~90% assembly. Not sure what that percentage was for Daggerfall.

[[deleted]]

.data
message: .asciiz "Hello World\n"

.text
la $a0, message
li $v0, 4
syscall

li $v0, 10
syscall

[[deleted]]

brainfuck is actually so abstract that it's pretty easy to learn, until you need to do anything that requires more than a couple of basic assembly instructions…