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Anyone here use assembly? (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Missing ";" on line 148.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.