this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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The game Roller Coaster Tycoon was famously hand written in raw CPU instructions (called assembly language). It’s only one step removed from writing literal ones and zeros. Normally computers are programmed using a human-friendly language which is then “compiled” into CPU instructions so that the humans don’t have to deal with the tedium and complication of writing CPU instructions.
To further emphasize this, I had an assembly course in university. During my first lab, the instructor told us to add a comment explaining what every line of assembly code did, because if we didn't, we would forget what we wrote.
I listened to his advice, but one day I was in a rush, so I didn't leave comments. I swear, I looked away from the computer for like 2 minutes, looked back, and had no idea what I wrote. I basically had to redo my work.
It is not that much better than reading 1s and 0s. In fact in that course, we spent a lot of time converting 1s and 0s (by hand) to assembly and back. Got pretty good at it, would never even think of writing a game. I would literally rather create my own compiler and programming language than write a game in assembly.
I'm probably completely insane and deranged, but I actually like assembly. With decent reverse engineering software like Ghidra, it's not terribly difficult to understand the intent and operation of isolated functions.
Mnemonics for the amd64 AVX extensions can go the fuck right off a bridge, though.
VCVTTPS2UQQmight as well be my hands rolling across a keyboard, not a truncated conversation from packed single precision floats into packed unsigned quadword integers.I had a course in uni that taught us assembler on z/os. My advisor told me most students fail the course on the first try because it was so tough and my Prof for that course said if any of us managed to get at least a B in the course, he'd write us a rec letter for graduate school. That course was the most difficult and most fun I've ever had. I learned how to properly use registers to store my values for calculations, I learned how to use subroutines. Earned myself that B and went on to take the follow up course which was COBOL. You're not crazy, I yearn to go back to doing low level programming, I'm mostly doing ruby for my job but I think my heart never left assembler hahaha
https://menuetos.net/