The Art of 64-bit Assembly

00x54MUR41 about 3 hours ago 12 commentsRead Article on nostarch.com

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Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tensegrist•27 minutes ago

i'm sorry, starting with "you can ask AI to … [but it'll do an incomplete and bad job]" and then launching forth into a hundred words of AI-produced text is not very appetizing

i hope this is the publisher's fault and the author replaces it with something decent of their own. contrary to the opinions i've heard around (including elsewhere on this thread) learning asm is still meaningful today and it's something i'd like to get better at so i will consider getting this book or one like it once $work is a bit less hectic

amelius•37 minutes ago

Is anyone still writing assembly in the age of LLMs? Asking seriously because most assembly is just doing one very simple thing very fast and because it's so simple conceptually, an LLM can easily code it without errors.

sousousou•32 minutes ago

Yep. In my experience, LLMs easily go in circles with even simple assembly, creating fixes that result in 2x slower code and then fixing those with even slower code. They are pretty great as a reference or finding needle in the haystack bugs though!

emptybits•24 minutes ago

I'm not being flippant but I think part of your answer is in the first two words of the title.

IME while LLMs may help delivery utility in a finished work, humans often value the absorption, mastery, style, or constraint of performing a mundane activity hands-on and brains-on.

mdp2021•27 minutes ago

> Is anyone still writing assembly in the age of LLMs ...

Yes. Its "simplicity" is exactly why we pick and assemble piece by hand - we imagine the leanest way.

LLMs are (not just in Assembly, but especially) very precious as a natural language manual.

> an LLM can easily code it without errors

One day it will probably also be able to have sex, and yet we think we will not pass on the experience - unless, like some kind of coding, it will be a "strictly professional only for money" operation (like in Monty Python's Argument sketch).

Edit: as esteemed emptybits wrote above, rephrasing: it's /the Art of/ Assembly.

WalterBright•19 minutes ago

I do now and then, for bits of code that is not expressible in the language. Things like special instructions, or special fixups.

eat•24 minutes ago

You could've also asked if people still wrote assembly in the age of compilers, and the answer would be the same. Sometimes we want/need to control or understand what is emitted by the tool.

However, I want to point out the obvious fact that people are still playing the piano in the age of the self-playing piano. Humans are experiential creatures, and we enjoy a wide range of activities for their own sake that may have nothing to do with efficiency of output.

Keyframe•22 minutes ago

an LLM can easily code it without errors

can't tell if sarcasm or not. Just in case it's not.. in that case why don't we all vibe everything in assembly? No need for abstractions anymore since that's a human concept. LLM can do it without errors, as you say, and we'll reap the benefits of speed!

mdp2021•17 minutes ago

> why don't we all vibe everything in assembly

I really loved this retort, but we have to reply: from that cone of perspective, it would be probably better to "vibecode" in C and not hope that the LLM does a better job than the compiler (for efficiency, not for absence of bugs as per the original).

fragmede•15 minutes ago

Because it's not portable. The world we find ourselves in is at least x86 and ARM, and assembly for one isn't good for the other. LLVM has a hardware agnostic intermediate representation (IR) that one could use though.

Retr0id•about 1 hour ago

> what Windows actually expects the vtable to look like

I'm not a Windows-knower, are vtable layouts part of the user<->kernel ABI?

invokestatic•about 1 hour ago

It’s part of the MSVC x64 ABI, not a part of the kernel ABI. The kernel and user mode (Win32) APIs all use C linkage so vtables are not relevant and the ABI is a convention of the compiler not the OS. Practically speaking though if your software runs on Windows it will probably use the MSVC ABI.

Joker_vD•31 minutes ago

Last time I checked, software compiled with both Cygwin and MSYS2 internally uses SysV calling convention, only switching to WINAPI when calling, well, Win32 API.

boguscoder•about 1 hour ago

Yes, you either follow Itanium ABI (non Win) or MSVC ABI. Technically nothing stops _your_ compiler from implementing totally own conventions but it will only be compatible with itself

Joker_vD•33 minutes ago

GHC uses its own calling convention yet it's compatible with Win API just fine. The secret, of course, is to implement not only your bespoke calling convention, but also the other ones that you care to interoperate with.