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Comment on Anon appreciates Chris Sawyer

notabot@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.

Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. It’s kind of nice to do, in many ways it’s simpler than high level programming, you’ve just got a lot more to keep track of.

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LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
This isn’t really true on modern systems anymore. Lower level languages like C and Rust are more or less just as performant as handmade assembly.

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- notabot@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little you’d write in assembler now-a-days, and you’d probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.
  
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  - sunstoned@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    No disrespect, but I love that folks from the UK always say “assembleuh” like they were on their way to saying “assembly” and got spooked halfway through
    
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- sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yup. And our processors are a lot more powerful, so the tricks you’d do in assembly to eek out performance just don’t matter anymore.
  
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  - mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I know it’s a typo but “eek out performance” has made me picture someone programming a little ghost to spook the rest of the code into running faster
    
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    sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I think it was a subconscious letter swap. :) I’ll keep it because ghosts.
    
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  - melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    uh, well, im running like fifty things at once on all my devices, and except for the OS, all of them were coded with this design philosophy. I can definitely tell.
    
    on a commercial device, with everything snitching on me to fifty different people at once, computing actually appears to slow down over time.
    
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    sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    That’s not because of hand-written assembly vs compilers, that’s because everyone and their dog wants abstractions up the wazoo. You have frameworks on top of frameworks, and no compiler can efficiently sift through that nonsense.
    
    I’d really like to see a shift back toward compiled languages like Rust to cut through the bloat.
    
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  - LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yes that’s what I was referring to.
    
    It’s some sort of out of order execution and branch prediction that does it. The thing you’re usually waiting on the most is IO.
    
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- easily3667@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  If you need to precisely know exactly how many instructions are running in a loop (ie super duper embedded)
  
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Simulation6@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I used a macro assembler to create assembly programs once. It made the process much easier, at least for the tiny things I did. Can not image a full game.

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