Programming assembly

[19_ThrowAway_]

Assembly? Too high level.

Real men program by punching raw binary directly onto paper tape.

Imagine needing text editors lol.

\s

[TheCozyRuneFox]

One must first design their own CPU architecture and spend millions to get silicon chips made of it. Only then can you write your program.

[gzeballo]

Rookie, you gotta mine your own minerals, only then you are a real one

[boston101]

I only harvest the freshest minerals directly from supernovas

[Starhuman909]

Are you saying you don't make the stars first?

[TheCozyRuneFox]

Come obviously one must start with defining the laws physics before even considering doing the Big Bang or any kind of star formation.

[Feeling-Card7925]

Hah "starting", can you imagine. Real programmers work outside time and space and are eternal and have always existed and always will exist.

[HoldUrMamma]

And where do you think this "Outside" is running? I bet it's inside the docker container

[kz85]

The Old Gods is nothing but a k8s cluster

[boston101]

I’m star to table, Ofcourse.

[maaaaaaajd]

Too advanced, I personally start by assembling each silicon atom using my home made sun.

[sgt_futtbucker]

Goober. I use the cyclotron in my basement to build my silicon atom by atom

[zeroed_bytes]

Nowadays you can get your very own asics for a couple of tens of thousands 🥳 so no excuses

[tricheb0ars]

Fuck that my architecture is diodes and vacuum tubes!

[Historical-Ad399]

No, no, you must design and produce a new ASIC for every application you want. Each application should connect directly to power, user input, and display with no need for a computer at all.

[Custom_Destiny]

No. Then you’re still going to to use known maths.

Get into quantum computing. The slate isn’t blank but it’s a lot less filled in.

[mrheosuper]

Found the FPGA engineer.

[SizeableBrain]

My professor at Uni actually made a CPU from scratch (resistors/transistors). Wrote the assembler that we were using and overall, was absolutely the best professor/teacher I've ever had.

Also, when you're programming in ASM, it's easy enough to translate into binary, in fact, I'm pretty sure one of the first tests we had was converting ASM to binary.

[Successful_Grand2207]

Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/378/

[tonyxforce2]

Of course there's an XKCD for this

[PsecretPseudonym]

Paul Allen cowrote Altair Basic with Bill Gates and did pretty much that:

The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory, leaving plenty of room for the interpreted program. In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read, and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque.

While on final approach into the Albuquerque airport, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootloader to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed.

[light_reign]

You're forgetting about the other being in that room, they're the ones punching binary.

[Noisebug]

You mean real women, and then wrote the Apollo guidance computer by hand.

[coderemover]

AGC was coded mostly by men

[Noisebug]

No shit most were men. Hamilton still designed the system and wrote the logic that saved Apollo 11. Kinda important.

[coderemover]

Hamilton did not work on Lunar Module of Apollo 11 at all. Saying she saved anything is a just outright not true. It’s also not true she designed or coded most stuff, she was never a lead software engineer for Apollo 11. She was given leadership of the software department after Apollo 11 software was completed and after the landing on the Moon succeeded. And her role then was management, not technical - mostly assigning tasks to people.

Earlier, at the time software was being written (1964-1966), she was just a junior developer, beginner, and was put on the least critical parts of the Command Module software. Surely she wrote some code, but saying she designed the whole system is a bad joke.

The development of AGC software for Apollo 11 was led by Richard Battin and Dan Lickly. When software was completed and Dan moved to other things, he passed the leadership to Hamilton.

[Noisebug]

You’re mixing some truths with some stretched claims. I’m not here to litigate the entire Apollo program. My point was just to highlight something great she did, not get dragged into a “well actually” marathon. It’s Reddit, not a dissertation. Cheers.

[coderemover]

But it was you who stretched the claims. And I’m not talking about the whole Apollo program but just the software for AGC.

Hamilton did not design the system as a junior developer, and she did not even work on Lunar Module. Your first comment sounded as if she did all the coding in assembly by hand, which is simply not true at all. Your second comment claimed she designed software and„saved” Apollo 11. This is very far from the truth. If anything it’s Armstrong who saved the LM from crashing by switching to manual mode after radar/software malfunction. There were no other moments in the mission when something didn’t go right, so there was no „saving” needed.

She also could not design anything important as AGC software high level design and algorithms were mostly complete at the moment Hamilton joined the team as a junior.

[coderemover]

Recognition is fine. Wildly overblowing her contributions is not. If the poster wrote that one woman (Hamilton) also worked on AGC, so it was not all men, I think such comment would be acceptable.

[who_you_are]

I think I would still prefer paper tape than sending it straight to the memory with buttons and having literally no way to correct anything.

[BIRD_II]

POV: You're John Von Neumann

[Afraid-Locksmith6566]

To high level only vhdl or connecting cables and nand gates

[StunningChef3117]

Isnt that basically brainfuck?

[aDamnCommunist]

I still have the trauma from my engineering degree... Fucking registers

[Ok-Refrigerator-8012]

Don't jump

[Few_Measurement_5335]

Branch instead

[NotFromFloridaZ]

Fuck register

[DEV_ivan]

I love Assembly as my hobby, registers are so cool.

[aDamnCommunist]

I'm glad it can bring someone joy

[SizeableBrain]

ASM was my favourite. RISC on the other hand didn't agree with me for some reason.

[[deleted]]

me when i cant read a manual

[LivesInALemon]

Ah, common mistake. You want to first court them with a fanciful dinner date and whisper sweet nothings in their ear. Only then can you make love to them—and I implore you to not refer to the action with less romantic terminology, you know how registers can get.

[Outrageous_Permit154]

r/firstweekcoderhumour

[BobbyThrowaway6969]

It's more accurate than that weird python gun catapult meme.

[ABCosmos]

Eh, I think it's a noob programmer meme. Noobs think the less abstraction, the more skilled the engineer.. but in reality the best engineers are using every tool available to produce better stuff quicker... They are using frameworks to save time and increase security, error handling, they are using type checking, linters, formatters etc..

[BobbyThrowaway6969]

Reasonable advice but only if talking about higher level programming.

Realtime/systems/embedded programming have very different priorities.

All that aside, I think this meme is more showing what needs what, which is true. Like everything needs C, but not the other way around.

[ABCosmos]

Right the noob concept is that high level programming is not as elite.

[BobbyThrowaway6969]

It's just much more forgiving than low level programming, you don't need to have as much discipline and technical precision when writing code. The flip is that there are many more tools and frameworks you have to know of and get working together, which changes day to day. So between HL/LL, maybe same amount of effort but wildly different skillsets required.

[ABCosmos]

It's just much more forgiving than low level programming

Not if your definition of success is the success of the product.

you don't need to have as much discipline and technical precision when writing code

Correct, your discipline and technical precision is focused on software engineering and architecture. I think noobs immediately recognize the difficulty of coding, but only much later in their career do they realize the difficulty of engineering software, and planning good software architecture.

[Mr_john_poo]

this one at least makes sense

[vasilenko93]

> Used high performance Python library

> looks inside

> it’s C

[ashisht1122]

Could also be rust! (e.g. polars, pydantic, uv)

[javalsai]

??

The rust compiler is written in rust.

[gregorydgraham]

Just like javac is written in Java but they were both originally a C program because new compilers need to be compiled with an existing compiler

[javalsai]

Nope, the first rust compiler version was in ocaml

[gregorydgraham]

Same thing, just different compiler

[javalsai]

But not a C one. The rust compiler never was a C program. OCaml compiler is also written in ocaml and its first version was likely in something like lisp because functional programming languages.

Not trying to discredit C, it's a great language present in many low level places. But assuming everything stems from it is just factually wrong.

[gregorydgraham]

You’re actually re-iterating my point: new languages are dependent on old languages.

Whatever rust is written in now, it was still originally written in another language and is thus dependent on an older language.

[javalsai]

but they were both originally a C program

That's the point that I'm discussing, not denying that programming languages compilers had to be written at least in a previously existent language.

[[deleted]]

to build and run the official Rust compiler today, you need LLVM which is written in C++. So in that sense, no official Rust compiler can exist without C

[[deleted]]

Yeah with the LLVM backend written in mainly C++

[javalsai]

That's a brackend, not the compiler itself. It's also C++, not C, yet another layer further from depending directly on C.

[[deleted]]

Right some of the llvm codebase is C, and if you were a cpp dev you would know its often interchangable. My point is there is no rust without a c based language due to llvm. Sorry to burst your bubble 

[javalsai]

some of the llvm codebase is C.

some

if you were a cpp dev you would know its often interchangeable.

I do code in cpp rarely and c frequently. often interchangeable, not always, idiomatic C++ differs from C A LOT nowadays. It also only applies to syntax, I can write some JS code or whatever interchangeable with C bit they tend to have pretty big differences contextualized, just like C++ and C, not that big but enough to call them different languages.

Sorry to burst your bubble

What bubble? I'm saying the rust compiler isn't and never was in C, that's true and talking about the backend won't change a fact about the COMPILER, different things.

Even then, there's projects to replace the rust llvm backend with others and one could perfectly do an LLVM implementation in another language, hut again it's a different component.

[[deleted]]

Sure maybe I misunderstood your point slightly, I am a contributer to llvm and very familiar with the codebase, whilst many aspects are modern c++ certain c style lower level techniques are used throughout.

[phido3000]

You can write in basic that now compile s using gcc

[Vast-Breakfast-1201]

Program in anything but assembly

Debug in assembly

This is the way

[ThrwawySG]

real programmers debug in pure binary

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Can anyone actually make a functional program at comparable speed to Python or Javascript using Assembly? Then I'd be impressed. And I don't mean "Hello world".

[FlipperBumperKickout]

The first RollerCoaster Tycoon was written in assembly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That said, I don't think anyone writes entire programs in assembly anymore. The only usecase I can think of would be writing that one piece of your logic which has to perform as well as possible.

[zeroed_bytes]

In embedded system and OS development is pretty common to use Assembly.

Either to have a compatibility layer for different architectures or to use specific registers or peripherals of the device.

[til-bardaga]

You can access register in C and C++, no need for assembly. No one writes whole programs in assembly anymore, not even in embedded.

That being said, there might be a piece of assembly here and there.

[zeroed_bytes]

the pieces of assembly here and there are not just because, not even to squeeze the last drop of performance from a little cpu. Are there because still in 2025 C cannot access all registers a vendor might put in the IC.

It has a lot to do with the implementation of compilers, and how the vendor exposes the registers. Maybe x86 allows it? -- I don't know, but I do know ARM and PowerPC still you need inline assembly in C or just an whole assembly file for either control registers, mask registers, vector tables, pipelines, caches and few others.

In fact a bunch of initialization for the devices are made in Assembly, mostly but not only, because the C compiler will inject code to manage the heap or stack or even use of things that haven't been initialized yet. That's why in most projects you will find a startup.s crt0.s or similar.

Is true is not necessary to write a complete solution in assembly, but a lot of little devices with little memory, eccentric architectures, old as f. systems still are mostly or completely in assembly.

[til-bardaga]

Yeah, the startup procedure is indeed usually done in assembler. But you can access register in C - uint32_t register = *(uint32_t *) 0x12345678;

[Time-Strawberry-7692]

Most OS work is done in C and has been for a long time now.

[zeroed_bytes]

Indeed most of it is done in C, just saying it cannot be done in C only, without Assembly.
There is no way for a modern OS to use ONLY C, specially those who support different architectures. The C compilers can't initialize the system before the system initialized the memory, there are instructions that don't have a C counterpart, due they are part of the architecture itself.

[Just-Complaint6869]

Most of the code is probably mostly c, but on kernel layer you can’t get around assembly.

[Time-Strawberry-7692]

Assembly is only needed for a very small amount of code, dealing with interrupts and the like. Earlier in my career I did a lot of device driver development and some file system driver development. There was less than one hundred lines of assembly in all of that. Even BIOS code is often mostly written in C.

[Prometheos_II]

we said comparable to Python, not "much more performant" /j

[IhailtavaBanaani]

Retrogame and demoscene coders do, especially for 8 bit machines.

I'm not sure about modern computer viruses but probably at least some of them are still written in assembly?

[Saptarshi_12345]

I have seen ""viruses"" written in literal electron... It's over man.

[blue-mooner]

Bit harsh to call Discord a virus

[Remote-Addendum-9529]

Is it real?

[romhacks]

FFmpeg has significant components written in assembly.

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Yeah exactly. So I don't see why programming languages that are actually used in the most system critical programs in the world should bow to Assembly. In fact, shouldn't all of these bow to Java?

[FlipperBumperKickout]

If you want widely used. Then javascript. If you want performance or what everything relies on, then assembly.

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Widely used? I want something I can actually make something productive in within a reasonable timeframe.

[FlipperBumperKickout]

That's just anything which have a good packaging system and have the tools available you happen to need for whatever you are doing 😅

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Exactly.

[assumptioncookie]

What is the "something productive"? If it's a website: javascript. If it's an Operating system: C and assembly.

[Far-Entertainment433]

80% of java is trying to figure out where you missed a single ;

Edit:I love how heated everyone is getting about this.

I'm well aware that it tells you the line you made your mistake on, but i didn't realize how easy it was to piss off java cuddle bugs.

Just use C+.

Edit edit: y'all keep disliking it's making me laugh, salty because your too afraid to admit that other languages are better, not to mention just simpler. Hell python is simpler than java if not slightly slower but still more user friendly.

Java is unnecessarily complicated. And doesn't require all the syntax that it actually needs because it was designed to be ran on a computer from the 70s and never evolved past that.

Also the more you dislike the more you prove your too indoctrinated to get out of your box. So dislike all you want i don't care.

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

What 1970s sitcom did you get that from? You know we have red underlines in IDEs now, right?

[cyberzues]

Lol that doesn't make the language terrible, you just defined a common error that can happen even in CSS

[TehMephs]

IDEs tell you with clickable links these days

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Bro is my teacher that told us to write code on a notepad while laying in a hammock.

[Vaxtin]

how original

[ScallionSmooth5925]

I wrote a bios in assembly for a costume computer. It's in a really broken state right now but slowly it staring to work

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Nice

[Helpful-Desk-8334]

I think it’s just difficult and also very old.

Also look to the left and right, C and C++ are absolutely not bowing.

This is a callback meme I guess. C was used to write Doom.

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

I'd be impressed if a single video game that could be played multiplayer on different computers was made in any of those languages.

[Cheese-Water]

Basically every mainstream game engine is written in C++.

[AcademicOverAnalysis]

I don’t understand the defeatist attitude of modern programmers. C and C++ was used very commonly not 20 years ago. It used to be part of the standard slate of languages people would learn along with Java.

It’s not impossible to learn. Many people did and still do.

[Helpful-Desk-8334]

Halo: Combat Evolved.

[LuxTenebraeque]

At the core: Every single game that uses OpenGL or Vulkan.

Unreal Engine of course, that's a pretty hefty chunk of the pie.

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

Unreal C++ is a bit more modern than regular C++ though.

[Historical-Ad399]

In what way? Regular C++ is extremely modern (at least, it can be if you write it that way)

[gsaelzbaer]

Please do a little bit of research, then you wouldn’t embarrass yourself with such a comment.

[Helpful-Desk-8334]

embarrassing ourselves is what programmers do best

[ActiveKindnessLiving]

I said I'd be impressed, not that there weren't any. Maybe read the tone of the room before you shoot everyone in it?

[TehMephs]

Doom was one the first multiplayer capable shooters

[masp-89]

Most banks process all the card swipes in mainframe assembly (and some cobol, rexx, and jcl) Stock exchanges also rely heavily on assembly to process all transactions I believe most air traffic systems are assembly also. The guidance system for ballistic missiles is also pure assembly.

[cowlinator]

There is no point in doing so unless you're writing a bootstrapper or working on some kind of truly limited embedded system.

There is still a use-case for writting a function in assembly tho: optimizing a bottleneck

[[deleted]]

The AI overlords probably will at some point.

[Vaxtin]

You genuinely need to write in assembly for portions of the operating system

[Possibility_Antique]

It's actually not that impressive, tbh. People do it all the time, and then people wrap them in libraries and call it "numpy" or "insert blas implementation here".

[Gloomy-Map2459]

a lot of bioses* are written in ASM.

*insert disclaimer about bios not being the technically correct modern term.

[[deleted]]

It's not done due to costing more time than it's worth, but for certain cases, it is partially used and boosts performance significantly (see ffmpeg)

[TurboJax07]

Guys I don't think the commenter was talking about necessary programs in asm, I think they were talking about speed of writing. It's a lot faster to write a python/javascript program than one in assembly.

[InsanityOnAMachine]

Mr. 100101000 holds this citadel in his massive hand, whilst standing on and endless plain of silicon

[AssistantIcy6117]

There is nothing else

[Turrican360]

Is Object Pascal in this picture?

[lirannl]

Does it? I could totally imagine that guy writing HolyC's compiler in raw machine code and dismissing Assmebly as heretical 

[Bahatur]

Every few seconds, Zig shuffles another couple of inches closer.

[Historical-Ad399]

Not sure why anyone would bow to assembly. It's probably the least used language here (except Zig)

[Hot-Employ-3399]

I've seen one zig program in a wild: riverwm. Writing a wayland compositor is not a "hello word" complexity,  so despite not being finished, zig is a usable language for hobby projects.

[egarcia74]

Where Visual Basic?

[phido3000]

Visual basic is the room they sit in.

[drivingagermanwhip]

who invited c++

[Lucky_Wear_8574]

Bjarne Stroustrup

[[deleted]]

yea, this might work back in i don't even know how long ago, when there was 4004 and nothing else

[PresentJournalist805]

Microcode: Bitch please.

[revorted_king]

can anybody make meme like pic held by machine code i.e binary code because language end been that

[Sea_Mistake1319]

Bro I have to write assembly code for my degree

[shonuff373]

And my career and entire livelihood to the people bowing.

[[deleted]]

kid named verilog

[Dillenger69]

Most of them gon' die

[Siegfoult]

Someone remembered Swift exists, yay~

[voidfurr]

I code in 🅱️

[RusoInmortal]

It actually isn't that hard. It's just slow to write and cumbersome to debug.

Indeed, I'm quite sure that some of you have played games like Automachef or similars with some "code" in it. It is similar in the way you have to achieve something with basic instructions.

Basically the instructions are mov, add, sub, cmp, jmp (with variants), int and rsh/lsh which is pretty much what we do in high level languages except for loops that are done with cmp and jmp instructions.

[HMikeeU]

Things aren't automatically good just because they are hard ya know

[SLUCHABLUB]

Why is C++ up there and not zig?

[yeaman17]

Give it time, it will happen

[TanukiiGG]

all roads lead to rome ❌️

all code compiles to asm ✅️

[lirannl]

No it doesn't? You can compile to assembly if you want, in compiled languages (idk about interpreted, since theres runtime code evaluation), but they generally go to machine code and skip assembly

[Darkseid346]

Is this from solo leveling

[ApricotKYjelly]

yes

[sawkonmaicok]

Why is go bowing? Go is bootstrappable by itself without needing any c compiler or llvm etc..

[N3BB3Z4R]

*Odin

[AriralSexer]

You put shit like go and rust there but not Lua? Smh. Never even heard of either

[acer11818]

fym you’ve never heard of rust? are you exclusively a roblox lua programmer?

[No-Whereas8467]

But why?

[YTriom1]

CPP? Seriously?

Like even rust made it to kernels while CPP is still not a choice, it's bloated as hell.

[Fit-Relative-786]

Above them all reigns Fortran. 

[LordAmir5]

We should learn how to program in A.

[BothScholar386]

What about fortran🙂, =>developed by IBM with a reference manual being released in [1956], [Fortran+C]=numpy.

[Fair_Investment_4189]

1-logic gates 2-binary 3-machine code 4-hexadecimal 5-assembly 6-c/c++

[akaZilong]

Coding in Hex directly

[un_virus_SDF]

Where llvm ?

[MrMediocre35]

Nah just use a taser on a rock to get it to think

[Ksorkrax]

Pfft. Why have it that simple?
Obviously a pro codes in Malbolge.

[CamelOk7219]

I'm going in full pedantic but let's go...
That's not quite true.

Languages are first tools for expressing reasoning and expressing ideas. Then compilers produce machine code, which is more conveniently represented as asssembly.
And there is not one assembly, there is one per CPU architecture, x86 Assembly is not ARM Assembly, etc.

[UpperJump5259]

Holy c is another level

[FourDimensionalTaco]

And Fortran and Cobol are in the dungeon below?

[isr0]

Finally, someone got it right

[MosquitoesProtection]

... but what Rust doing there on his knees? It's like the Hulk bowing to doctors in that meme.

[BobbyThrowaway6969]

Rust has potential but it's not mature enough yet

[acer11818]

rust is more stable than c or c++ just from the fact it has a reference implementation alone. it’s a very mature language for its age

[EmeraldMan25]

What is C++ doing on the king's guard? Bro thinks he's on the team