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Thread: ASSEMBLY SUCKS

  1. #1
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    Angry ASSEMBLY SUCKS

    Sorry to lay my gripes on your ears, but I HATE ASSEMBLY! The class I'm in involves computer circuitry and assembly programming, and I can't stand it. Granted programs run more efficient, but it's a pain in the @ZZ to make. Buuuuhhhhuuhhuugggg... midterms next week.

    On a side note, does anyone know assembly really well and have a generous nature to help me if need be? Thanks.

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    Question

    Which one? I've done a bit of IBM 360/370, and MIPS (RISC arch.) type of assembly, but I don't know jack about x86.

    Programs do run more efficiently but at extremely high manpower cost. It costs more man-hours to maintain than most other languages so the benefits are easily offset by cost.

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    I've done a little 68000 and Sparc assembly.

    It was fun, but the prof sucked the life out of the course

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    Unhappy

    B'OH! It's x86... ... I finished my first lab, and it went okay, but it's hard to figure out when to push registers on the stack, and how to pop them in a manner that allows four registers to provide everything you may need. Geez. Are any programs even done in assembly anymore? It just seems too inefficient to make programs like that.

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    It seems like most things are done in a higher level language now. For example, Windows NT was written in C. (Dunno what they did 95/98 in) But there are still places where assembly is used. I know a financial company that uses it primarily and some small microcontrollers use it b/c C is takes up too much memory.

    I don't see x86 assembler in use much at all anymore. I remember the game Comanche (flight simulator) was written in x86 asm. It ran so fast on my 486-33 for something that complicated; I was impressed.

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    If you could rewrite win2000 by assembly language, the whole **** thing would sneeze to no more than 10 MB. It would fly even on a 486/33

    Of course, that will require many times more human power to write in assembly than in C or other language

  7. #7
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    Arrow

    Actually, assembly isn't terribly difficult to write. The instructions are pretty straight forward albeit primative. 90% of its difficulty lies in debugging. Easy to write; incredibly difficult to read and follow.

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    Red face

    Do you really think that if the major OS's were rewritten in assembly, that they would be that much more efficient? And that much smaller? I don't understand how a program that does the same thing, but is written in a different language could be that much smaller. Also, one of our homeworks involved calculating efficiency vs. man hours, and it said that assembly runs four times more efficient than higher level programming languages, but takes ten times longer to program. Are those statistics accurate?

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    Probably.

    I program x86 and MIPS assembly, the one thing *I* hated about learning MIPS was that the simulator did wierd things, and it was totally undocumented. Like it would alter $4 (by convention this holds the first parameter to a syscall) and $2 (which holds the first returned variable) when some commands were used, but nobody told us it did that. It took me an hour to figure out this was why a procedure to get an integer was always returning 10 or -10! All because $2 kept getting overwritten everytime a key was pressed and echoed to the screen, by the default kernel's keyboard handler. Grrr..

    [This message has been edited by Paul V (edited 04-29-2000).]

  10. #10
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    Wink

    Assembly is definitely an amazing language. When I started learning assembly I was surprised at how much could be accomplished with so few commands! I learned assembly while programming my TI-85 (Z80) in high school. Now that I am in college, I have used the Motorola 68hc11 and hc12 for a few design projects. After a few years of programming in both assembly and c/c++, I would have to say that I like them equally, but assembly sure is challenging to debug.

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    Smile

    In college I had to design a cruise control for a steam engine using assembly and an 8086 processor. It was a ton of fun (even though we never did get to fully work correctly!) Ah....those were the days!

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