To be fair, assembly lines of code are fairly short.
/ducks
Writing in ASM is not too bad provided that there’s no operating system getting in the way. If you’re on some old 8-bit microcomputer where you’re free to read directly from the input buffers and write directly to the screen framebuffer, or if you’re doing embedded where it’s all memory-mapped IO anyway, then great. Very easy, makes a lot of sense. For games, that era basically ended with DOS, and VGA-compatible cards that you could just write bits to and have them appear on screen.
Now, you have to display things on the screen by telling the graphics driver to do it, and so a lot of your assembly is just going to be arranging all of your data according to your platform’s C calling convention and then making syscalls, plus other tedious-but-essential requirements like making sure the stack is aligned whenever you make a jump. You might as well write macros to do that since you’ll be doing it a lot, and if you’ve written macros to do it then you might as well be using C instead, since most of C’s keywords and syntax map very closely to the ASM that would be generated by macros.
A shame - you do learn a lot by having to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do - but I couldn’t recommend it for any non-trivial task any more. Maybe a wee bit of assembly here-and-there when you’ve some very specific data alignment or timing-sensitive requirement.
I like ASM because it can be delightfully simple, but it’s just not very productive especially in light of today’s tooling. In practice, I use it only when nothing else will do, such as for operating system task schedulers or hardware control. It’s nice to have the opportunity every once in a while to work on an embedded system with no OS but not something I get the chance to do very often.
On one large ASM project I worked (an RTOS) it’s exactly as you described. You end up developing your own version of everything a C compiler could have done for you for free.
I mean, I’m pretty sure it would be a good learning experience so I would really not regret it.
I tried decades ago. Grew up learning BASIC and then C, how hard could it be? For a 12 year old with no formal teacher and only books to go off of, it turns out, very. I’ve learned a lot of coding languages on my own since, but I still can’t make heads or tales of assembly.
Sounds very similar to my own experience though there was a large amount of Pascal in between BASIC and C.
Yeah, I skipped Pascal, but it at least makes sense when you look at it. By the time my family finally jumped over to PC, C was more viable. Then in college, when I finally had to opportunity to formally learn, it was just C++ and HTML… We didn’t even get Java!
Assembly requires a knowledge of the cpu architecture pipeline and memory storage addressing. Those concepts are generally abstracted away in modern languages
You don’t need to know the details of the CPU architecture and pipeline, just the instruction set.
Memory addressing is barely abstracted in C, and indexing in some form of list is common in most programming languages, so I don’t think that’s too hard to learn.
You might need to learn the details of the OS. That would get more complicated.
Try 6502 assembly. https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/
My favorite assembly language by far.
this page is great. starting right at “draw some pixels” in such a simple way just instantly makes it feel a bit more approachable!
Step 1: Begin writing in Assembly
Step 2: Write C
Step 3: Use C to write C#
Step 4: Implement Unity
Step 5: Write your game
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Profit
Good thing I wrote my own game engine using D, and soon there will be 2 (known) games for it.
D
I was really into D, but I gave up on it because it seemed kind of dead. It’s often not mentioned in long lists of languages (i.e. I think Stack Overflow’s report did not mention it), and I think I remember once looking at a list of projects that used D and most of them were dead. I think I also remember once seeing a list of companies that used D, and when I looked up one of them I found out it didn’t exist anymore 😐️
Reminder that ttd was open source even before open ttd :D
I don’t know if everyone gets the reference: RollerCoaster Tycoon is in fact writing mostly in assembly to use the hardware more efficiently
Started playing openrct2 multiplayer with a friend yesterday. Some of the best fun I’ve had.
Writing it in assembly would make it pretty much the opposite of portable (not accounting for emulation), since you are directly giving instructions to a specific hardware and OS.
Sorry, two separate thoughts. Wasn’t saying open RCT used assembly just wanting to shout out the project.
