Anyone who thinks OP asking about Assembly with this meme should play the game Turing Complete. It’s great. You have to design a computer all the way from the most basic logic gates (I think you only get a NAND gate to start), designing an ALU and CPU, creating your own machine language, and writing your own programs in the language you designed, and it’s all simulated the whole time. Machine language is pretty advanced as far as things go.
We got to do something simular in uni. We modeled the CPU in VHDL and had to set up our own language, then we were to program a game for it. One of the most fun and interesting courses we got to do!
OS and embedded dev here. I use assembly all the time. I’ve even worked on firmware that was entirely in assembly of strict requirements that couldn’t be met in C.
Also even machine code hides a lot about how the underlying machine works so if you really want to do computing from scratch you really do hate to invent the universe because there’s abstractions all the way up the hardware stack just like there is in software.
For a university assignment, I built a compiler for x86; I cheated a bit by relying on LLVM, but it gave me a better understanding of the architecture.
I also developed emulators for the NES (Ricoh 2A03) and RISC-V (RV32I) as a hobby. For the latter, I implemented it in FPGA.
Only on the VIC20 and Atari STe. On the VIC20 you had to write the assembler, manually convert it to machine code and enter that into the computer. There was a cartridge with an assembler, debugger and an extra 3.5Kb memory for it but I never got one.
Vic 20 was my first. I watched my dad struggle with and eventually give up on assembly. Something-something and the microbots. I was fearful of it until I took Assembly at Uni. That 2nd/3rd year class was where the final puzzle piece of how computers work fell in place for me.
My first job was writing assembly tests for a DSP hardware design team. Fell in love. Never looked back.
Not exactly accurate, I think. Even machine language is bound by the CPU’s architecture. You can’t do anything in machine language that wasn’t specifically provided for by the CPU architects.
It would be more accurate to say it’s like creating a new universe using all the same laws of physics, thermodynamics, cosmology, ethics, etc as our existing universe.
I don’t think accuracy was the goal, it is a joke not a dissertation. It’s more about how it feels to try a language like assembly after working with higher-level languages.
IMHO assembly isn’t hard. When you gain enough experience you start to see „visual patterns“ in your code. For example jumping over some lines often equals to a if/else statement or jumping back is often a loop etc. Then you are able to skim code without the necessity to read each line.
The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.
I needed it often in the past in the PLC world but it is dying out slowly. Nonetheless, when I encounter 30+ year old software I’m happy to be able to get along. And your experience transitions to other architectures like changing from one higher language to another.
Nonetheless, if I’m able to choose, I’ll take Go. Please and thank you 😊
The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.
It’s a long time since I wrote any assembly in anger, but I don’t remember this being an issue. Back then Id be writing 2D and 3D graphics demos. Reasonably complex things, but the challenge was always getting it fast enought to keep the frame rate up, not code structure.
As you say, I think you just establish patterns to decompose the problem.
How about entering straight opcode, operand with only a hex keypad and two pairs of 7 segment LEDs. You can only see one set of numbers at a time. You had to write it out on paper to be able to keep track and count positions so you don’t use your spot.
I had to do this as a project in school. Two 8088 units that we breadboarded to a UART that we used to drive a fiber optic link to communicate with each other with a basic protocol. All descrete components hand wired and coded.
It made you tie all of skills together into a full system of hardware and software.
I think the university I went to phased out the EE requirements the year after me. Honestly, I think it should be required. Understanding how the computer “thinks” is such an important skill.
I attended two different Bachelor’s courses, one with a very technical (2016-2018) and one with a more high level focus (2018-2023). The first did have a class where we learned how to go from logic gates to a full ALU as well as some actual EE classes, but I didn’t go far enough or memorise the list of classes to remember whether Assembly would have become a thing. We learned programming with first Processing, then C and C++.
The second had C as an elective course, and that was as technical and low-level as it ever got.
Which target did you use? Having to learn even a fraction of modern x86 would be ridiculous, but SPARC or something could be good to know, just to reduce the “magic box” effect.
I learned mips as graduate. In undergrad had to build with logic gates for things like 2 digit decimal counter and my architecture classes were diagram blocks for a simple CPU. But by that time we knew how to do moderate complexity circuits in VHDL simulation, and we had to make a simple VHDL circuit run for real in FPGA.
I had to learn assembly but was one topic of many we handled in architecture. Like one question of one exam. That was one of the toughest professors we had, class was about 2001
It’s now been 18 years since the last time an employer paid me to write assembly, but it’s only been a year or so since the last time I had to read assembly at work (in order to verify what the compiler really was doing).
Assembly isn’t that hard. It’s the same imperative programming, but more verbose, more work, and more random names and patterns to remember. If you can understand “x += 3 is the same as x = x + 3”, you can understand how the add instruction works.
I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.
These days, you won’t be able to beat the compiler even if you wrote your code in assembly, maybe with the exception of bespoke SIMD algorithms. Writing assembly is something only kernel developers and microcontroller developers may need to do in their day to day life.
Reading assembly is still a valuable skill, though, especially if you come anywhere near native code. What you think you wrote and what the CPU is actually trying to do may not be the same, and a small bit of manual debugging work can help you get started resolving crashes that make no sense whatsoever. No need to remember thousands of instructions either, 99% of assembly code is just variations of copying memory, checking equality and jumping anyway. Look up the weird assembly instructions your disassembler spits out, they’re documented very well.
Having toyed with video game reverse engineering, I definitely feel like I ought to learn a bit more. I understand mov, pointers and registers, and I think there was some inc and add in the code I read to try to figure out base pointers and pointer paths (using Cheat Engine), but I think knowing some more would serve me well there.
Modern decompilers like the one packaged with Ghidra helps a lot for intuiting how instructions work. Unfortunately, a lot of video game code is obfuscated, so you’re probably more likely to run into weird instructions, but OK the other hand you’ll learn what they do faster than when you rarely encounter them.
Assembly is hard, because you need to understand your problem on multiple levels and get absolute zero guidance by compilers.
Even C guides you a tiny bit and takes away some of the low level details, so you have more mental capacity to actually solve your problem.
Oh, and you have a standard library. Assembly seems to involve solving everything yourself. No simple function call to truncate a string or turn a char array to uppercase.
Unless you’re developing an OS or something, you’ll probably be using the C standard library and maybe a bunch of other libraries provided by most distros. Just because you’re doing assembly doesn’t mean you need to program syscalls manually.
Modern assemblers also come with plenty of macros to prevent common mistakes and provide common methods. For instance. NASM comes with things like %strcat to do string concatenation.
I suppose the lack of compiler warnings can be a challenge, but most low-level compilers don’t exactly provide guidance for when you design your program wrong.
No doubt Assembly is harder than Java or Python, but compared to languages like C, I don’t think it’s as hard as people pretend to it to be.
I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.
Well, they’ve got a point for the bigger machine codes. Just the barebones specification for x86 is a doorstopper IIRC.
From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.
From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.
I think that’s true for just about any programming languages, though the program you’re “compiling” is a human understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Things like val bar = foo.let { it.widget?.frub() ?: FrubFactory::defaultFrub(it) } don’t come naturally to the human mind, you’re already working through the logic required before you start typing.
As for the x86 instruction count: you don’t need to know all of them. For instance, here’s a quick graph of all of the instructions in systemctl on my system:
With the top 15 or maybe to 25 of these instructions, you can probably write any program you can think of, and what’s missing will probably be easily found (just search for “multiply” or “divide”). You don’t need to know punpckldq to write a program.
What language is your pseudocode example modeled after? It vaguely reminds me of some iOs App code I helped debug (Swift?) but I never really learned the language so much as eyeballed it with educated guesses, and even with the few things I double checked it has been a few years, so I have no clue what is or isn’t legal syntax anymore.
That’s Kotlin. Mostly used for programming for the JVM, though it compiles to native code as well these days. Very interesting for cross platform app development, although I rarely do that these days.
I think Swift has a similar syntax, but it doesn’t do some of the less obvious Kotlin tricks as far as I’m aware.
I’ve heard of Kotlin in the context of Android apps, but never actually used or learned it. I did one mobile app dev project with Java in Android Studio, but never had any formal classes on it either and just learned as I went (the result was shit, but we got a decent grade for being able to evaluate the difficulties and shortcomings and point out learnings).
TIL. I had tried to understand it a bit, but felt lost pretty fast, and then eventually found out that’s because it’s huge. Is there a good intro to the basic instructions you’re aware of?
By “play act the compiler” I mean a fairly elaborate system of written notes that significantly exceeds the size of the actual program. Like, it’s no wonder they started thinking about building machine compilers at that stage.
I believe this guide can get you started pretty quickly to get the basics down. There are tons of guides online, but most of them will give you the basics (“this is how to find a prime number”) and then leave you on your own. Once you know how instructions, calling conventions, and system calls work, the rest of assembly programming is just reading documentation or Googling “how do I X in assembly”.
What can help is using websites like godbolt.org to write simple C programs and looking at the compiled output. Look up instructions you don’t recognize and make sure you don’t enable optimizations, unless you want to deal with atrocities like VGF2P8AFFINEINVQB.
If you don’t mind getting started with old assembly, there are also more comprehensive guides for MS-DOS and old Windows that mostly involve 16 bit and 32 bit programs programming. 64 bit programming is different (uses more registers to pass variables, floating point support is guaranteed, etc.) but there aren’t as many good books on the topic anymore now that it’s become a niche.
I think there are quite a few guides out there for ARM these days, if you have something like a Raspberry Pi or an emulator you can also learn ARM assembly (which has fewer supported weird instructions, but also a tonne of weird stuff).
If you want to go deep, you can also check Ben Eater’s youtube channel where he shows step by step how an 8 bit computer on a breadboard works, how instructions relate to memory, and all that. With some intuition from that, learning amd64 assembly may be a lot easier than going from normal programming languages to assembly.
Edit: to get into understanding assembly programming, [Human Resource Machine[(https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Machine/) will explain the concepts of assembly programming without ever overtly explaining the concepts. Plus, it’s a fun puzzle game.
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Anyone who thinks OP asking about Assembly with this meme should play the game Turing Complete. It’s great. You have to design a computer all the way from the most basic logic gates (I think you only get a NAND gate to start), designing an ALU and CPU, creating your own machine language, and writing your own programs in the language you designed, and it’s all simulated the whole time. Machine language is pretty advanced as far as things go.
From your description this sounds more like a job in IBM’s R&D department than a game
All the best games sound like jobs when you describe them.
factorio, satisfactory, oxygen not included, RimWorld, Stellaris, dwarf fortress, gregtech new horizons…
We got to do something simular in uni. We modeled the CPU in VHDL and had to set up our own language, then we were to program a game for it. One of the most fun and interesting courses we got to do!
I used to make video games entirely in assembly
OS and embedded dev here. I use assembly all the time. I’ve even worked on firmware that was entirely in assembly of strict requirements that couldn’t be met in C.
Also even machine code hides a lot about how the underlying machine works so if you really want to do computing from scratch you really do hate to invent the universe because there’s abstractions all the way up the hardware stack just like there is in software.
For a university assignment, I built a compiler for x86; I cheated a bit by relying on LLVM, but it gave me a better understanding of the architecture. I also developed emulators for the NES (Ricoh 2A03) and RISC-V (RV32I) as a hobby. For the latter, I implemented it in FPGA.
Only on the VIC20 and Atari STe. On the VIC20 you had to write the assembler, manually convert it to machine code and enter that into the computer. There was a cartridge with an assembler, debugger and an extra 3.5Kb memory for it but I never got one.
Vic 20 was my first. I watched my dad struggle with and eventually give up on assembly. Something-something and the microbots. I was fearful of it until I took Assembly at Uni. That 2nd/3rd year class was where the final puzzle piece of how computers work fell in place for me.
My first job was writing assembly tests for a DSP hardware design team. Fell in love. Never looked back.
Not exactly accurate, I think. Even machine language is bound by the CPU’s architecture. You can’t do anything in machine language that wasn’t specifically provided for by the CPU architects.
It would be more accurate to say it’s like creating a new universe using all the same laws of physics, thermodynamics, cosmology, ethics, etc as our existing universe.
I don’t think accuracy was the goal, it is a joke not a dissertation. It’s more about how it feels to try a language like assembly after working with higher-level languages.
I was pretty into x86 asm in my teens. Nasm was my go to. Anyone else ever play with MenuetOS?
Ha! I teach assembly and use this one every year to lighten the mood before midterms.
IMHO assembly isn’t hard. When you gain enough experience you start to see „visual patterns“ in your code. For example jumping over some lines often equals to a if/else statement or jumping back is often a loop etc. Then you are able to skim code without the necessity to read each line.
The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.
I needed it often in the past in the PLC world but it is dying out slowly. Nonetheless, when I encounter 30+ year old software I’m happy to be able to get along. And your experience transitions to other architectures like changing from one higher language to another.
Nonetheless, if I’m able to choose, I’ll take Go. Please and thank you 😊
It’s a long time since I wrote any assembly in anger, but I don’t remember this being an issue. Back then Id be writing 2D and 3D graphics demos. Reasonably complex things, but the challenge was always getting it fast enought to keep the frame rate up, not code structure.
As you say, I think you just establish patterns to decompose the problem.
Look at mister fancy pants with and assembler.
How about entering straight opcode, operand with only a hex keypad and two pairs of 7 segment LEDs. You can only see one set of numbers at a time. You had to write it out on paper to be able to keep track and count positions so you don’t use your spot.
I had to do this as a project in school. Two 8088 units that we breadboarded to a UART that we used to drive a fiber optic link to communicate with each other with a basic protocol. All descrete components hand wired and coded.
It made you tie all of skills together into a full system of hardware and software.
Alright you and Joe McMillan had a great weekend we get it
Not since the 1980s on a Commodore 64.
SYS64738
Assembly used to be a required course for CS undergrads in the 90s. Is that no longer the case?
Also we had to take something called Computer Architecture, which was like an EE class designing circuits with gates and shit.
I think the university I went to phased out the EE requirements the year after me. Honestly, I think it should be required. Understanding how the computer “thinks” is such an important skill.
I attended two different Bachelor’s courses, one with a very technical (2016-2018) and one with a more high level focus (2018-2023). The first did have a class where we learned how to go from logic gates to a full ALU as well as some actual EE classes, but I didn’t go far enough or memorise the list of classes to remember whether Assembly would have become a thing. We learned programming with first Processing, then C and C++.
The second had C as an elective course, and that was as technical and low-level as it ever got.
I still had to do that in the late 2010s in college
Which target did you use? Having to learn even a fraction of modern x86 would be ridiculous, but SPARC or something could be good to know, just to reduce the “magic box” effect.
I learned MIPS as an undergrad. Pretty neat little RISC architecture.
I learned mips as graduate. In undergrad had to build with logic gates for things like 2 digit decimal counter and my architecture classes were diagram blocks for a simple CPU. But by that time we knew how to do moderate complexity circuits in VHDL simulation, and we had to make a simple VHDL circuit run for real in FPGA.
This was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure it was 8086.
Required course work for electrical engineers in the early 2000s.
I had to learn assembly but was one topic of many we handled in architecture. Like one question of one exam. That was one of the toughest professors we had, class was about 2001
Its still a thing
I get the feeling that all of these assembly jokes are justifications to avoid learning assembly.
You can still make syscalls in assembly. Assembly isnt magic. It isn’t starting from the creation of matter and energy, it’s just very specific code.
It’s just a joke friend.
I said so in my comment, try to keep up.
A very bad one if it requires switching off a large portion of your brain to find it funny.
It’s now been 18 years since the last time an employer paid me to write assembly, but it’s only been a year or so since the last time I had to read assembly at work (in order to verify what the compiler really was doing).
Assembly isn’t that hard. It’s the same imperative programming, but more verbose, more work, and more random names and patterns to remember. If you can understand “
x += 3is the same asx = x + 3”, you can understand how theaddinstruction works.I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.
These days, you won’t be able to beat the compiler even if you wrote your code in assembly, maybe with the exception of bespoke SIMD algorithms. Writing assembly is something only kernel developers and microcontroller developers may need to do in their day to day life.
Reading assembly is still a valuable skill, though, especially if you come anywhere near native code. What you think you wrote and what the CPU is actually trying to do may not be the same, and a small bit of manual debugging work can help you get started resolving crashes that make no sense whatsoever. No need to remember thousands of instructions either, 99% of assembly code is just variations of copying memory, checking equality and jumping anyway. Look up the weird assembly instructions your disassembler spits out, they’re documented very well.
Having toyed with video game reverse engineering, I definitely feel like I ought to learn a bit more. I understand
mov, pointers and registers, and I think there was someincandaddin the code I read to try to figure out base pointers and pointer paths (using Cheat Engine), but I think knowing some more would serve me well there.Modern decompilers like the one packaged with Ghidra helps a lot for intuiting how instructions work. Unfortunately, a lot of video game code is obfuscated, so you’re probably more likely to run into weird instructions, but OK the other hand you’ll learn what they do faster than when you rarely encounter them.
If you want to write amd64 code, you can get away with mastering just one instruction, and that’s the kind of tomfoolery that obfuscated programs will try to use to make your life harder.
Assembly is hard, because you need to understand your problem on multiple levels and get absolute zero guidance by compilers.
Even C guides you a tiny bit and takes away some of the low level details, so you have more mental capacity to actually solve your problem.
Oh, and you have a standard library. Assembly seems to involve solving everything yourself. No simple function call to truncate a string or turn a char array to uppercase.
Unless you’re developing an OS or something, you’ll probably be using the C standard library and maybe a bunch of other libraries provided by most distros. Just because you’re doing assembly doesn’t mean you need to program syscalls manually.
Modern assemblers also come with plenty of macros to prevent common mistakes and provide common methods. For instance. NASM comes with things like
%strcatto do string concatenation.I suppose the lack of compiler warnings can be a challenge, but most low-level compilers don’t exactly provide guidance for when you design your program wrong.
No doubt Assembly is harder than Java or Python, but compared to languages like C, I don’t think it’s as hard as people pretend to it to be.
Missing “;” on line 148.
Well, they’ve got a point for the bigger machine codes. Just the barebones specification for x86 is a doorstopper IIRC.
From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.
I think that’s true for just about any programming languages, though the program you’re “compiling” is a human understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Things like
val bar = foo.let { it.widget?.frub() ?: FrubFactory::defaultFrub(it) }don’t come naturally to the human mind, you’re already working through the logic required before you start typing.As for the x86 instruction count: you don’t need to know all of them. For instance, here’s a quick graph of all of the instructions in
systemctlon my system:With the top 15 or maybe to 25 of these instructions, you can probably write any program you can think of, and what’s missing will probably be easily found (just search for “multiply” or “divide”). You don’t need to know
punpckldqto write a program.What language is your pseudocode example modeled after? It vaguely reminds me of some iOs App code I helped debug (Swift?) but I never really learned the language so much as eyeballed it with educated guesses, and even with the few things I double checked it has been a few years, so I have no clue what is or isn’t legal syntax anymore.
That’s Kotlin. Mostly used for programming for the JVM, though it compiles to native code as well these days. Very interesting for cross platform app development, although I rarely do that these days.
I think Swift has a similar syntax, but it doesn’t do some of the less obvious Kotlin tricks as far as I’m aware.
I’ve heard of Kotlin in the context of Android apps, but never actually used or learned it. I did one mobile app dev project with Java in Android Studio, but never had any formal classes on it either and just learned as I went (the result was shit, but we got a decent grade for being able to evaluate the difficulties and shortcomings and point out learnings).
TIL. I had tried to understand it a bit, but felt lost pretty fast, and then eventually found out that’s because it’s huge. Is there a good intro to the basic instructions you’re aware of?
By “play act the compiler” I mean a fairly elaborate system of written notes that significantly exceeds the size of the actual program. Like, it’s no wonder they started thinking about building machine compilers at that stage.
I believe this guide can get you started pretty quickly to get the basics down. There are tons of guides online, but most of them will give you the basics (“this is how to find a prime number”) and then leave you on your own. Once you know how instructions, calling conventions, and system calls work, the rest of assembly programming is just reading documentation or Googling “how do I X in assembly”.
What can help is using websites like godbolt.org to write simple C programs and looking at the compiled output. Look up instructions you don’t recognize and make sure you don’t enable optimizations, unless you want to deal with atrocities like
VGF2P8AFFINEINVQB.If you don’t mind getting started with old assembly, there are also more comprehensive guides for MS-DOS and old Windows that mostly involve 16 bit and 32 bit programs programming. 64 bit programming is different (uses more registers to pass variables, floating point support is guaranteed, etc.) but there aren’t as many good books on the topic anymore now that it’s become a niche.
I think there are quite a few guides out there for ARM these days, if you have something like a Raspberry Pi or an emulator you can also learn ARM assembly (which has fewer supported weird instructions, but also a tonne of weird stuff).
If you want to go deep, you can also check Ben Eater’s youtube channel where he shows step by step how an 8 bit computer on a breadboard works, how instructions relate to memory, and all that. With some intuition from that, learning amd64 assembly may be a lot easier than going from normal programming languages to assembly.
Edit: to get into understanding assembly programming, [Human Resource Machine[(https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Machine/) will explain the concepts of assembly programming without ever overtly explaining the concepts. Plus, it’s a fun puzzle game.
Thank you!