Programming in assembly isn't hard, it's just incredibly tedious. Doing manual linearization of an expression DAG, or manual register allocation, or manual control-flow layout very rarely adds any extra value compared to what the compiler will do for you.
As for the idea that AI can optimize code better if we give it assembly code, that's called a peephole superoptimizer, and we've known about it for quite some time ([1], which cites the first relevant paper as being from 1987). It's not new, and it's actually been used to improve the peepholes of compilers for quite same time now. The main limiting factor is probably in our ability to prove correctness of the code generated by search algorithms.
Counterpoint: I picked it up in high school and I was Not That Bright(tm).
Certainly, some complex instruction-set extensions or sprawling SIMD mnemonics are more challenging that what I was reading in the 90s, but the boogie-man status of assembly is greatly overstated.
The final thesis, that we can-and-should let LLMs micro-optimize assembly into non-statically-verifiable gibberish to save an instruction stacks misunderstandings on top of misunderstandings. Just vapid gold-rush cheer-leading from Wired.
Re your counterpoint, learning to write small extremely toy programs in assembly isn’t hard. But using it to write bug-free programs with non-trivial functionality is much more difficult.
Generally, people aren't writing programs with non-trivial functionality in assembly; they're writing very small, hyper optimized functions that get called by some higher level language.
Exactly ^^^ I taught myself assembly on my Commodore 64. However, I only used it for certain tasks that were suboptimal with Commodore's BASIC and 64K of RAM.
I enjoyed assembly programming in uni but haven’t done much since. This take to rewrite everything in it tends to pop up every now and then, and I think the last line sums pretty well why it never actually happens:
“It was probably just his imagination, but the display had been a little laggy, he thought. He’d redo the code if he could, he said. But alas, Sawyer and the machine did not speak the same assembly language.”
I have been playing with the idea of an LLM native programming language focusing on token efficiency, comprehension, and attention. It is interesting to see what the various large models come up with. A common theme actually reminds me quite of bit of assembly. The verb prefixing, limited statements per line, small concept surface area all appeared in multiple conversations across several larger models. The big difference being assembly lacks semantic meaning leaving some benefit on the table. I still cannot believe what some did with the tech, RCT is such a retro favorite.
I firmly believe that all programmers, even you, should be forced to program a microcontroller in assembly at least once.
IMO the utter lack of awareness that our abstractions represent a physical machine with real hardware that operates in finite time is why software today is so bad. Our languages are so far removed from the hardware that the CPU and its finite resources simply don't exist for most programmers. Many of the rising generation of engineers have no clue how a CPU works, what a register is, or what the cost of reading and writing to RAM is.
Assembly is not so difficult as to be unapproachable for beginners. Remember, back in the day we all started in assembly and produced a generation of absolutely brilliant engineers and scientists. We all had to understand the physicality of the real machine and we had to make the best we could with very constrained resources.
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music..." -- John Adams
In all seriousness, I agree with you that it's useful for everyone (I started with the free reference volumes from Intel). But it isn't essential anymore to be productive and write reasonably performant software in most domains -- the platforms have changed, the abstractions have soared. But ultimately, yeah, more knowledge and exposure is never a bad thing.
The minority of developers that need to know it and are interested in knowing it will continue to learn it, I'm sure.
I am coding my own wayland compositor, in rv64 assembly... running on x86_64 with a small interpreter.
I am currently only using the core ISA (no compressed instructions, not even the pseudo instructions), and I use a C preprocessor to avoid to get my code locked on the preprocessor of one assembler.
I started to code assembly when I was a teenager as it is not hard: only uncomfortable. Nowdays, with what seems a real global, no IP locks, ISA, RISC-V, it is very reasonable to write directly assembly, as (real and sane) standard assembly is extremely efficient at fighting planned obsolecence.
Programming in assembly isn't hard, it's just incredibly tedious. Doing manual linearization of an expression DAG, or manual register allocation, or manual control-flow layout very rarely adds any extra value compared to what the compiler will do for you.
As for the idea that AI can optimize code better if we give it assembly code, that's called a peephole superoptimizer, and we've known about it for quite some time ([1], which cites the first relevant paper as being from 1987). It's not new, and it's actually been used to improve the peepholes of compilers for quite same time now. The main limiting factor is probably in our ability to prove correctness of the code generated by search algorithms.
[1] https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/...
"Assembly is Brutal"
Counterpoint: I picked it up in high school and I was Not That Bright(tm).
Certainly, some complex instruction-set extensions or sprawling SIMD mnemonics are more challenging that what I was reading in the 90s, but the boogie-man status of assembly is greatly overstated.
The final thesis, that we can-and-should let LLMs micro-optimize assembly into non-statically-verifiable gibberish to save an instruction stacks misunderstandings on top of misunderstandings. Just vapid gold-rush cheer-leading from Wired.
Re your counterpoint, learning to write small extremely toy programs in assembly isn’t hard. But using it to write bug-free programs with non-trivial functionality is much more difficult.
Generally, people aren't writing programs with non-trivial functionality in assembly; they're writing very small, hyper optimized functions that get called by some higher level language.
Exactly ^^^ I taught myself assembly on my Commodore 64. However, I only used it for certain tasks that were suboptimal with Commodore's BASIC and 64K of RAM.
I enjoyed assembly programming in uni but haven’t done much since. This take to rewrite everything in it tends to pop up every now and then, and I think the last line sums pretty well why it never actually happens:
“It was probably just his imagination, but the display had been a little laggy, he thought. He’d redo the code if he could, he said. But alas, Sawyer and the machine did not speak the same assembly language.”
I have been playing with the idea of an LLM native programming language focusing on token efficiency, comprehension, and attention. It is interesting to see what the various large models come up with. A common theme actually reminds me quite of bit of assembly. The verb prefixing, limited statements per line, small concept surface area all appeared in multiple conversations across several larger models. The big difference being assembly lacks semantic meaning leaving some benefit on the table. I still cannot believe what some did with the tech, RCT is such a retro favorite.
I firmly believe that all programmers, even you, should be forced to program a microcontroller in assembly at least once.
IMO the utter lack of awareness that our abstractions represent a physical machine with real hardware that operates in finite time is why software today is so bad. Our languages are so far removed from the hardware that the CPU and its finite resources simply don't exist for most programmers. Many of the rising generation of engineers have no clue how a CPU works, what a register is, or what the cost of reading and writing to RAM is.
Assembly is not so difficult as to be unapproachable for beginners. Remember, back in the day we all started in assembly and produced a generation of absolutely brilliant engineers and scientists. We all had to understand the physicality of the real machine and we had to make the best we could with very constrained resources.
"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music..." -- John Adams
In all seriousness, I agree with you that it's useful for everyone (I started with the free reference volumes from Intel). But it isn't essential anymore to be productive and write reasonably performant software in most domains -- the platforms have changed, the abstractions have soared. But ultimately, yeah, more knowledge and exposure is never a bad thing.
The minority of developers that need to know it and are interested in knowing it will continue to learn it, I'm sure.
https://archive.ph/jV1CI
I am coding my own wayland compositor, in rv64 assembly... running on x86_64 with a small interpreter.
I am currently only using the core ISA (no compressed instructions, not even the pseudo instructions), and I use a C preprocessor to avoid to get my code locked on the preprocessor of one assembler.
I started to code assembly when I was a teenager as it is not hard: only uncomfortable. Nowdays, with what seems a real global, no IP locks, ISA, RISC-V, it is very reasonable to write directly assembly, as (real and sane) standard assembly is extremely efficient at fighting planned obsolecence.
How did you validate correctness of your interpreter?