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Anon appreciates Chris Sawyer
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. It's kind of nice to do, in many ways it's simpler than high level programming, you've just got a lot more to keep track of.
This isn't really true on modern systems anymore. Lower level languages like C and Rust are more or less just as performant as handmade assembly.
Sure, compilers have come a long way since then and there is vanishingly little you'd write in assembler now-a-days, and you'd probably drive yourself mad trying to do so on anything more complex than a microprocessor.
No disrespect, but I love that folks from the UK always say "assembleuh" like they were on their way to saying "assembly" and got spooked halfway through
Yup. And our processors are a lot more powerful, so the tricks you'd do in assembly to eek out performance just don't matter anymore.
I know it's a typo but "eek out performance" has made me picture someone programming a little ghost to spook the rest of the code into running faster
I think it was a subconscious letter swap. :) I'll keep it because ghosts.
That's not because of hand-written assembly vs compilers, that's because everyone and their dog wants abstractions up the wazoo. You have frameworks on top of frameworks, and no compiler can efficiently sift through that nonsense.
I'd really like to see a shift back toward compiled languages like Rust to cut through the bloat.
Yup. I feel that so much at my day job. We use Python on our BE, and we have so much waste on top of that
For example, we have some low level code for a simulation (not Python), and we ported it to Python, and we noticed the code spent a ton of its time doing bubble sort. So our Python implementation ended up being competitive by just making reasonable high level choices. We had a paginated sort + filter that loaded all possible records into RAM and did the logic in Python instead of SQL (fixing that dropped request time like 80% on larger queries).
We have so much more crap like that, it's not funny. But I'm ticking them off one by one by inflating my estimates a little to allow for refactors.
Yes that's what I was referring to.
It's some sort of out of order execution and branch prediction that does it. The thing you're usually waiting on the most is IO.
If you need to precisely know exactly how many instructions are running in a loop (ie super duper embedded)
I used a macro assembler to create assembly programs once. It made the process much easier, at least for the tiny things I did. Can not image a full game.