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.
Nah, I don’t hate myself that much.
I learned assembly for a few weeks when I first started a new job once (didn’t even have anything to do with my job), and I always felt like my brain was tired after trying to write in assembly. Just took so much more mental concentration than writing in c for example.
Assembly was easier to me than C/C++.
In college back in 1991. Also had to do PASCAL and FORTRAN but thankfully those two were in a single course.
I also took PASCAL in the 90s, but it is considered a high level language, and writes similarly to other high lvl languages, assembly has a very different syntax
We used turbo pascal in school in the early 90’s. And it had assembly blocks… which I used copious amounts of because it was the only way to make the IBM PS/1’s do useful graphics.
Oh, I know. I meant that we had to take courses on older languages as part of the curriculum. That was a funky little college program. The oddest experience for me was taking Python back in the day as the “new thing” then not seeing it again until it absolutely exploded ~10 years ago. That program is also why I ended up playing with Linux so early on. The professors truly seemed to have a passion for emerging technologies while not wanting anyone to forget what came before. Thankfully, no punch cards.
Ha! I teach assembly and use this one every year to lighten the mood before midterms.
I remember watching assembly demos in the early-mid 90s and thinking those guys were wizards
NASM FTW
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.
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!
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…
Mebly I do, and mebly I don’t.
I have Dyslexia ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry.
You dropped this \
Short explanation: Type ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ to see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Long expanation: Lemmy supports formatting, like _italic_ becomes italic. To stop this from happening, you can put a \ before it like \_; the \ isn’t shown. This is why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ becomes ¯_(ツ)_/¯. To show a \ you need an additional \ like so: \\, and to make sure _ is shown and not turned into italic, it too needs \. This is why ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ becomes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The backslash is known as an escape character in this context, because it removes (escapes) the special meaning of the following character.
It’s also used that way in most Unix shells.
I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?
global _main extern _GetStdHandle@4 extern _WriteFile@20 extern _ExitProcess@4 section .text _main: ; DWORD bytes; mov ebp, esp sub esp, 4 ; hStdOut = GetstdHandle( STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE) push -11 call _GetStdHandle@4 mov ebx, eax ; WriteFile( hstdOut, message, length(message), &bytes, 0); push 0 lea eax, [ebp-4] push eax push (message_end - message) push message push ebx call _WriteFile@20 ; ExitProcess(0) push 0 call _ExitProcess@4 ; never here hlt message: db '¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯', 10 message_end:
Alternatively, you can just use the `` enclosure, used for single line code.
That is a “grave accent” or a “backtick”, the key you will find on the left of the ‘1’ key and under the ‘Esc’ key on a standard (ISO, maybe) 104/105 key qwerty keyboard.
I had an assembly class in college. I didn’t love of at all. Got my first job after graduating and it was writing space shuttle engine control software, which was in assembly. I was kind of surprised at how fast it became natural after dealing with it full time. Still, it felt luxurious when we upgraded the controller and could do the software in C.
“oh no, I had to do literal rocket science”
From my understanding, one of the actual use case of assembly is for cyber security engineers to dump assembly instructions from a compiled program, so they can check for any potential vulnerability. I’ve also seen assembly included in an embedded codebase (the overall project is in C), which I assume is for more optimized performance and deterministic behavior
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.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.
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
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.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.
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.
