X86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary
I think to many programmers assembly is the &quot;GOTO&quot; of programming languanges: From the day you start learning to program, you are told that all this fancy high-level-language stuff is there so you do not have to deal with assembly. So most people never go there.<p>I <i>did</i> go there, briefly, about ten years ago. It was wicked fun. But all in all, I may have written maybe 20 or 30 instructions of assembly in total. I did try to rewrite a few small, heavily-used functions from our code base in assembly only to discover that the code I came up with was practically identical to what the compiler emitted. At that point I figured that the people who told me that &quot;you can&#x27;t beat the compiler&quot; were probably right and called it a day[0]. Alas, I never had the hardcore performance requirements that would make go back there. But it was fun to get a taste of it.<p>[0] At the same time, I was kind of proud that I did not get beat by the compiler. Then again, those functions were fairly trivial.