Slashdot Mirror
TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly (tiobe.com)
TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" measures the popularity of languages by the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. Their July report indicates that Assembly has become one of the 10 most popular languages:
It might come as surprise that the lowest level programming language that exists has re-entered the TIOBE index top 10. Why would anyone write code at such a low level, being far less productive if compared to using any other programming language and being vulnerable to all kinds of programming mistakes? The only reasonable explanation for this is that the number of very small devices that are only able to run assembly code is increasing. Even your toothbrush or coffee machine are running assembly code nowadays. Another reason for adoption is performance. If performance is key, nobody can beat assembly code.
The report also noted that CFML (ColdFusion) jumped from #102 to #66, Maple from #94 to #74, and Tcl from #65 to #48. But Java still remains the #1 most-popular language, with C and C++ still holding the #2 and #3 positions. Over the last five years, C# and Python have risen into the #4 and #5 spots (made possible by PHP's drop to the #6 position) while JavaScript now holds the #7 position (up from #9 in 2011). Visual Basic .NET came in at #8, and Perl at #9.
The report also noted that CFML (ColdFusion) jumped from #102 to #66, Maple from #94 to #74, and Tcl from #65 to #48. But Java still remains the #1 most-popular language, with C and C++ still holding the #2 and #3 positions. Over the last five years, C# and Python have risen into the #4 and #5 spots (made possible by PHP's drop to the #6 position) while JavaScript now holds the #7 position (up from #9 in 2011). Visual Basic .NET came in at #8, and Perl at #9.
I've been involved in firmware development for implantable medical devices as well as other devices and it's simply not true that assembly has much use this day in age. Unless you are coding for one of the small memory footprint AVR or PIC devices you are not going to get better results working in assembly.
They are machine dependent.
X86, ARM, AVR, IBM360, PDP8, or what? Just saying 'assembly' is not all that interesting. Processor architecture(s) would be interesting to know.
"Why would anyone write code at such a low level, being far less productive if compared to using any other programming language and being vulnerable to all kinds of programming mistakes?"
...More productivity down the drain.
A) Why don't you ask them and learn?
B) I politely disagree that they are automatically "far less productive". I am an embedded programmer and have only used tiny amounts of assembly over the last decade. However, if I had more tiny projects, and my bosses weren't akin to cats chasing flashlight spots to where I could stick with the same processor for more than a year, I'd consider it for sure. Why? Because I never seem to get to just "code and go" anymore. As an example, last week I had to reinstall my multi-gigabyte Eclipse IDE for the SECOND time this past year (this time due to a debugger corruption). In such IDEs, all the higher libraries (and their paths) need to be in place, and compiled too (which doesn't always go perfectly). Whereas my former officemate would open any text editor (his was Corel Word Perfect(!)) to write his assembly, then compile on the command line, then upload the binary.
I don't know how many hours I've spent learning and fixing IDEs. Then, a year to two later, the IDE changes again after the chip's OEM "upgraded" it!
There's more than one reason to want optimization. There's optimizing for speed in a full algorithm, in which case assembler isn't that important. But optimizing for speed in localized locations can be very important. Ie, the faster your interrupt handlers are the better I/O throughput you can get, or faster context switches, etc. If you're programming on a DSP for instance, you almost always want the best speed and that often means assembler or assembler wrapped inside of macros or special directives. There's also optimization for size, and occasionally assembler helps there as well to cram in as much as you can in the limited space.
And of course you need to *know* assembler even if you don't write it. It's how you decode core dumps, figure out what your code is doing, and lets you treat the machine as more than a black box (I've seen people with efficient algorithms that weren't so fast because they didn't understand what was fast or slow under the hood).
Here's a electric toothbrush reference design from Texas Instruments.
Here's the MSP430G22x0 microcontroller used in the design.
Here's a list of software tools for that microcontroller. The list includes something called "GCC", which they say is an "Open Source Compiler for MSP Microcontrollers".
Here's a page from Renesas about electric toothbrush designs.
Here's a list of software tools for Renesas processors; they list C compilers for the R8C and RL78 microcontrollers, as mentioned in the previous page.
So don't assume all the code in your toothbrush was written in assembler language; some of it may have been written in C, although some of the low-level library routines might be written in assembler (or an asm in the C code).
That hasn't really been true for a long time, unless your hand-written assembly code will reliably outperform a good compiler's generated code.
Hint: It's a reasonably safe bet that it won't, unless you actually are a world-class expert on the subject, such as the people who write those compilers.
Modern CPUs are not the chips your grandpa programmed. They are full of caches, pipelines, predictive execution, parallel operations, and numerous other confounding factors that mean what you think will run fast and what will actually run fast may be two wildly different things, even in apparently simple cases.
Whole teams of very smart people spend years reading and understanding thousands of pages of CPU specs so they can write compilers that analyse and optimize code at the speed of those modern CPUs to generate efficient machine code from it. Even if you can beat them on implementing one simple algorithm in isolation because you can spot something the compiler missed, modern high level languages encode so much more programmer intent than raw assembly that you might still lose out overall because you're disrupting larger-scale optimisations.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I write compilers for a living, and I came in to say something much like the above.
I have direct experience recoding moderate sized C++ functions in hand-coded assembly. I have been able to beat the C++ compiler, but... not easily, and not without major elbow grease and lots of my time. It's most often not an easy thing to do, because the compiler has sophisticated scheduling and optimization algorithms, and because of the hardware complexity the parent post is talking about. Most programmers weaned on Java don't quite grasp the performance complexity that exists in modern CPUs.
Does it ever make sense to write asm directly? Once in a while, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, optimization time is better spent at the C++ level improving the time complexity of algorithms that dominate the problem space, or perhaps recoding Java into C++. Outside of very specialized and rare circumstances, I don't find reasons to optimize below the C++ level.
There are highly constrained devices where directly coding asm is the way to go, but fewer and fewer all the time.
People suck at macro optimizations in assembly. If your assembly program is more than 25 instructions, you're probably not going to do a better job than a compiler.
If you're writing intel code you'll probably see better speedup using c++17 parallel policies or some other parallelization framework, but sometimes it is necessary to optimize small segments of code. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and effective use of templates and metaprogramming can go a long way without much effort. Embedded devices should be treated to same way. Write a high level implementation in the highest level language available to you and hand optimize only when necessary.
I've compared c++ stl implementation of algorithms to c implementations and my c++ almost always runs faster with significantly less code. Small programs that calculate trivial results are always faster in low level languages, but real programs need complicated structures and its almost always infeasible to hand optimize those effectively.
There are a lot of processors out there that aren't complicated. On an 8 bit microcontroller with an instruction set size of only a few dozen, it's not hard to beat compiled code.
Play Command HQ online
Counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, the smaller your instruction set, the higher the chance that the compiler is actually better at optimizing than you are, unless you have a LOT of experience writing and optimizing assembler code. Mostly because the smaller the set, the longer the code gets and the more you have to take into account certain side effects from instructions. I spent quite a few hours puzzling why the compiler would completely rearrange the instructions only to notice that it gained a bit of an advantage from creative pipeline restructuring and carefully manipulating certain jumps.
The only area where humans outperform compilers reliably is conditional jumps. Because humans can usually more readily tell from the intended program flow which branch is more likely to be executed and can optimize the programs in that way. Hand that information to the compiler and I hold any bet that it will outperform you any day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you do not know assembly, you cannot be a really good coder and you cannot even understand how common attacks on code work these days or why some things run much slower than others. That said, actually coding in assembly is something you only do when there are very good reasons to and mostly as assembly embedded in C.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They are full of caches, pipelines, predictive execution, parallel operations, and numerous other confounding factors
You are using all the same arguments C/C++ programmers used in 1995 but if the discussions wasnt about assembly language but instead the discussion was a comparison of compilers from 1995 with compilers from 2015 you would be telling us how terrible those 1995 compilers were at optimization even then.
..and if you are "confounded" by caches, pipelines, superscaler techniques, and so on ("cause surprise or confusion in (someone), especially by acting against their expectations.") then its because you are ignorant of the architecture. Your ignorance doesnt define reality.
..and notice how its now 10% faster... or 20% faster... there is a range because it depends which gcc compiler version is used (older versions produce better code.) If gcc has such a large variance in performance, if newer versions are slower, then what are we to think of the veracity of your claims? I'll tell you what: they arent veracious claims. They are wishful thinking.
The fact is that it doesnt require an expert to beat a compiler at optimization. The fact is that your idea of an "average assembly language programmer" is actually a terrible assembly language programmer. When you dont consider someone that learned C/C++ a month ago an average C/C++ programmer, why do you then consider someone thats literally never actually taken assembly serious as the benchmark average?
Recently a programmer undertook the task of converting the strongest open source chess engine (stockfish) to 80x86 assembly language. He still has done no optimization. He has literally just done a straight simple conversion and its already 10%...20% faster and is now easily beating the C++ compiler version in tournaments.
"His name was James Damore."
You may be right for some VERY small and trivial applications, but sometime in the early 90's optimizing C compilers FAR outstripped hand-coded assembly for any larger project. These days it isn't even a contest. A good optimizing compiler like the Intel C/C++ compiler can crank out code that is anywhere from 3 to 10 times faster than what you can do by hand. I should know, I did PLENTY of Assembly, and worked with some LARGE assembly-language applications back in the 80's. ALL of them were totally rewritten in C before 1995, and I'm talking about RTOS kernels and stuff, things where one clock cycle matters. There may be some few very specific 'inner loop' interrupt handling logic and such that is still written in assembler, mostly because that sort of code is idiosyncratic and can't really be safely optimized, but we're talking a very few lines of code, maybe 500 out of 500k SLOC.
I can buy the idea that there are 'IoC' things out there with extremely minimal processing power, basically little 8 bit devices with a few K bytes of RAM and Khz CPU clocks that you really CANNOT code in an HLL. Of course the amount of code that you write for that thing is obviously also extremely minimal. We're talking "blast this fixed length 802.11 frame out there every 2 seconds with these 12 bytes holding the RAW bit values from the ADC and the 3 discretes to a broadcast address" kind of thing.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson