x86 Assembly

[Human1235234]

How easy would it be to start x86 assembly? Is it even practical? What tools would I use?

[trag1c]

Being able to write assembly still has its occasional use but at this point its more beneficial to be able to read assembly. Being able to understand what is happening in a C/C++ assembly is beneficial for understanding what operations are going on when analyzing performance sensitive code. More often than not you won't actually write any assembly since modern compilers are highly intelligent when it comes to translating higher level source code. Still worth while to learn though. 

 

With that said when you create a C++ project with Visual studio it includes the assembly tools (MASM) and you can add assembly files to the solution as well. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/assembler/masm/masm-for-x64-ml64-exe?view=msvc-160

[Radium_Angel]

8 minutes ago, Human1235234 said:

How easy would it be to start x86 assembly? Is it even practical? What tools would I use?

I was an assembly programmer.

It took years of therapy to expunge that crap from my brain.

 

I'm only partially kidding.

 

Assembly was needed when you wanted to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a single-core several hundred MEGAHERTZ CPU. Now that we have multi-core Gigahertz, it's less critical.

 

Assembly is a monumental PITA to program, what do you need it for?

[Human1235234]

16 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I was an assembly programmer.

It took years of therapy to expunge that crap from my brain.

 

I'm only partially kidding.

 

Assembly was needed when you wanted to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a single-core several hundred MEGAHERTZ CPU. Now that we have multi-core Gigahertz, it's less critical.

 

Assembly is a monumental PITA to program, what do you need it for?

PITA?

 

 

I just want to learn as a project.

[Human1235234]

17 minutes ago, trag1c said:

Being able to write assembly still has its occasional use but at this point its more beneficial to be able to read assembly. Being able to understand what is happening in a C/C++ assembly is beneficial for understanding what operations are going on when analyzing performance sensitive code. More often than not you won't actually write any assembly since modern compilers are highly intelligent when it comes to translating higher level source code. Still worth while to learn though. 

 

With that said when you create a C++ project with Visual studio it includes the assembly tools (MASM) and you can add assembly files to the solution as well. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/assembler/masm/masm-for-x64-ml64-exe?view=msvc-160

Thanks for your help

[mariushm]

The only time I'd consider assembly is when I can save a few cents a piece on an order of 100k units of a microcontroller, as assembly code MAY use less memory and therefore may fit in a cheaper microcontroller that has less built in memory.

 

For small quantities, it's not worth it... it takes more time for a developer to code something, it takes more time (and money) for another developer to pick up where another left off, all for very small improvements.

 

These days you'll find hand written x86 assembly mostly in very tight and critical paths of programs and in optimizations, like for example in audio video codecs.

For anything else, it's not worth it.

 

If you want to learn something, go learn Go (golang) and then do some web assembly from there,  or maybe play with freepascal  and decompile the programs it generates and see the assembly code.

[Radium_Angel]

10 minutes ago, Human1235234 said:

PITA?

 

 

I just want to learn as a project.

Pain In The A....

[Human1235234]

33 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Pain In The A....

I take that as a challenge

[DevBlox]

I highly encourage learning even though it's impractical in 99.99% cases. The importance of understanding it supersedes the impracticality. Also do well to emit ASM from some language and compare, optimized vs not optimized etc. Keep in mind that a modern x86 instruction set (with extensions and stuff) is huge and you will not learn all of it anyway. Consider starting of with Intel 8088 (you can use DosBox and Turbo Assembler) for a start, or even going ARM or RISC-V.

[Dat Guy]

FASM is a mostly sane compiler which comes with a built-in linker and allows one to write (theoretically) portable ASM code.