The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, August 31, 2015

The days when assembly was required

From about the mid-80s to the mid-90s, I pretty much programmed exclusively in assembly langauge. Along the way, I learned the 6809, (my favorite of the 8-bit CPUs), x86, 68000 (my favorite of the 32-bit CPUs), VAX and MIPS assembly languages, and I can recognize (and could probably program in if I had to) the 6502, 8080, Z80 and SPARC. I don't program much (if any) in assembly anymore. The CPUs have gotten too complex, the optimization rules too arcane and numerous and porting programs just gets tedious in assembly (they're practically a rewrite). Besides, compilers are getting better and better over time, negating the use of assembly except for absolute performance (when C or Fortran won't cut it).

But I still like assembly language, and I find these assembly gems (link via Hacker News) fun to read, even if they aren't that useful these days.

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