Hacker News Reader

Comment by vox_mollis | Hacker News Reader

Or security, for that matter. Reversing, malware analysis, black-box auditing, &c require, at minimum, the ability to read assembly.

The article is begging the question. I'm unaware of anyone who thinks assembly is not relevant.

View on HN

There's a ton of people who don't need assembly. Including security engineers that work in C with tools like Astree or Frama-C. Then, tools such as CompCert compiler can handle the rest. ;)

Blackbox and reversing, though, certainly need or benefit from assembly. Depending one what one is analysing.

There's a big difference between "assembly is not relevant for anyone" and "assembly is not relevant for everyone". I suspect few people hold the former view and a bunch hold the latter, but shortened both sound the same.

This is pretty much it, the last time I touched assembly was to write some string routines for Delphi 5 as the included ones where horribly slow, that was 16 years ago.

Since these days I'm a web developer I'm at a level in the stack where using Assembly would be alien and frankly I doubt I could anyway without some serious study.

Talk to a data scientist.

... Said no-one ever ;-)

Or from my experience lately, talk to javascript programmers.

They call javascript the "assembly" of the web, yeah certain subsets of programmers are interesting in their beliefs.

There are a lot of engineers out there work on higher abstractions. If the task is to write a map reduce or spark job, for sure, most of the time I don't think you need to know what happens with your application at assembly level.

If students count, the other day I heard some griping about how they had to learn assembly even though "we're never going to use it".

To be fair, students are mostly learning MIPS32. It's a 'language' great for teaching concepts while preserving the students' sanity. The fact that I have to run an emulator of an effectively dead-for-consumer use architecture to write labs hurts student satisfaction. You can't even be cheeky and use interesting, assembly dominated elements like SIMD.

The true masochists continue to x86 in the higher level courses.

What about all the consumer routers than run on MIPS cores?

Some places are starting to use ARM Thumb which is both reasonably sane and actually usable!

MIPS is alive and well. There is a huge world of software outside of websites, you know.

Where is MIPS still used. As far as I see it, it has mostly been replaced by ARM.

I've heard this but never understood why arm would be used over mips. Cost? Power consumption?

This is pretty sad, but a lot of students tend to be only interested in whatever is applicable to the job market of present day.

However, even students do need assembly language when they take their computer architecture, operating systems and compilers classes. And some students will probably end up to do compilers or operating system work professionally at some point in their careers.

Assembly language is still a very valuable skill although a few people will ever write any code by hand. But reading assembly code as well as writing programs that emit assembly code will always stay relevant.

Or writing compilers, OS drivers, to add two more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com