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.

Comments

Ahem

[kackle]

"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?"

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! ...More productivity down the drain.

Re:Surprise? Why?

[Darinbob]

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).

Re:Surprise? Why?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Surprise? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.