Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still Good

nickirelan writes "Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea by Randall Hyde -- Randall Hyde makes his case for why learning assembly language is still relevant today. The key, says Randall, is to learn how to efficiently implement an application, and the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language. Randall is the author of Write Great Code (from No Starch Press)."

Comments

Re:x86 aint what it used to be

[DarkEdgeX]

Nowadays, the x86 ISA is just an API...god knows how the core actually executes instructions and in what order, which makes it very hard to optimise code beyond a certain point.

Actually it's still pretty well documented which instructions are executed in which order, even on the Pentium 4. Agner Fog has a very nice document that I tend to reference when writing x86 ASM routines (usually to be linked in with a higher level language because the HLL emits poorly optimized code (or simply is unable to take advantage of certain processor features)). Give it a look--

http://www.agner.org/assem/