Whatever happened to the Assembly Language Application Programmer?

[AmkG]

Look at our forum now. It's full of questions about how to boot OS's, how to multitask, how to access the disk, and how to easily crash the system using priveleged instructions.

It's full of Systems programming stuff.

Whatever happened to the Application Programmers who just plain wanted to write applications and games in the most basic of languages? Who knew how to implement a nice screen interface completely in assembly? Who could create nice graphics out of a few simple mov statements and a lot of elbow grease? Who could crash the system, not by using some privelaged HLT command, but simply and easily by forgetting to put a ret at the end of a procedure?

Am I a member of a dying breed? Am I the last of my kind?

Just wondering.

Anyway, I like the forum now that there are SOME people typing stuff on it. I first got here in late April/Early May and the latest post was in March I think. Now it's better that there are lots more people here. Tends to keep the info flowing... Like I say: "Information has a tendency to be free. Which means someone will always tell you something you don't want to know."

 

[Prattaratt]

IMHO, The assembly Applications programmer started to die the day His Majesty William Gates the First released Windows. The operating environments have become so complex and restrictive in Windows that it becomes more time effective to use HLL's to do the majority of the programming, and use assembly for critical portions of the code. This is why you see most of the post's dealing with systems programming (i.e., Trying to circumvent The Windows restrictions.)
I'm trying to do an application in assembly right now, but only to see the challenges, and it's designed to run in a pure DOS environment. I would never even attempt to try to design a Windows assembly program of more than "hello world" complexity.

 

[OriginXYZ]

Heck yeah

OriginXYZ

 

[twistor]

Hmmmmm, i can't decide if AmkG was just trolling... ok, i'll bite: i'm out here coding win32 assembly yes, for apps sake... its no more difficult than using VC++ (knowledge wise) just a heck of a lot more typing... heh...

 

[sarnath]

"C" killed the assembly language app programmer.

"C" combines the power of assembly language programming
and flexibility of assembly language programming. So
why would one run behind assembly.

An Optimised "C" compiler would generate code as good as Hand-Coded assembly. So why would any1 need assembly ?

The Best Optimiser is not assembly,
The Best Optimizer sits between ur ears

Sarnath
Do not rejoice that ur code works.
it might be a special case of an error :-(

 

[twistor]

>"C" combines the power of assembly language programming
>and flexibility of assembly language programming. So
>why would one run behind assembly.
>
>An Optimised "C" compiler would generate code as good as >Hand-Coded assembly. So why would any1 need assembly ?

One only has to look at the opcodes generated by a C compiler to see that they do an okay job, but if you are counting cycles even the best compiler is...well... dumb. So the strategy is: if you have a fast machine with oodles of resources, sure go ahead and use C; but if you want speed (and here one has to be careful not to "fix" too much!) and efficiency, hand-code the assembly yourself. Naturally if you have the luxury of time, and you don't have to port it to many different platforms, it pays to utilize Assembly.

When it comes to inner loops and repetitive tasks, you can achieve a decent performance improvement (some sources say 20%) using assembly rather than the optimised C compiler code.

I guess its really a question of control.

 

[AmkG]

Kinda agree with Twistor, you just have to look at code generated by a compiler... it looks pretty bleaah... "Information has a tendency to be free. Which means someone will always tell you something you don't want to know."