Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Wed Aug 22 20:51:45 2001

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated:
>
> XenoSoft skrev:
>
> >You are familiar with how many computers there are with Intel 80x86 family
> >processors, and you are familiar with the software that is being run.
> >Are you saying that there ISN'T a need to imporove the quality of that
> >software?
>
> I've been both told and taught that assembly is not used anymore on the Intel
> platform, at least not Intel-based computers, and that modern compilers do
> the job much better anyway.

  Assembly is still used, just very rarely, and usually for the lowest
levels of the operating system. I just checked Linux 2.0.39 (which I run on
all my servers) and each architecture branch has several assembly langauge
files---mostly for configuring the CPU (on boot) and maybe context switching
and memory copying routines).

  For small segments of code, an excellent assembly language programmer,
familiar with the problem, can still beat a compiler, but over a longer
range of code, or for most programmers, the compiler can still do a better
job.

  -spc (But you get the most gains through algorithmic optimizations ...)
Received on Wed Aug 22 2001 - 20:51:45 BST

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