Is it worth learning assembly language today? | One Dev Question

Do developers still need to know assembly language in this day and age? Larry Osterman gives us his opinion.

[gamemotronixg]

Yes never forget the fundamentals, Every computer science student must study assembly language

[icarvs_vivit]

In short: "Not if you're a web-dev."

[francoislecanadien]

My dad used to say (translation) "What you don't know hinders what you know" - The more you know... Thanks for the perspective, though !

[RikyPerdana]

If one day everyone in this earth gets petrified and you woke up 3700 years later as a programmer, knowing assembly language would be helpful to get our advanced civilization get back on track

PS: only few may know what this thing referenced to

[rdoetjes]

I think that colleges would need to teach 1 semester in assembler and hardware design. Either building a simple Z80, 6502 or MCS8051 board and write a few simple assembler programs on it.
It teaches you what’s efficient for a cpu and what not. And how hardware in its simplest form works.

It’s true that compilers (C and C++ compilers) are doing incredible things, and have specific OS and CPU knowledge that most programmers don’t have and with today’s CPUs with pipelines and out of order processing hand coded machine code will not be as efficient anymore as what these highly optimized compilers produce.

But for application security it’s a must. And I think academically it makes sense. I’ve trained many BSc graduates and non of them have had assembler anymore and since the 2010s not even C! And you see how terrible they are in efficient coding. They don’t understand system call overhead, context switches and proper memory usage to avoid GC as much as possible; because they don’t have this basic knowledge of operating systems, assembler coding and manual memory management and basic hardware knowledge.

[sealwithawkwardness]

I just know assembly so I could compare how much more efficient one implementation is over the other.

[sagivalia]

I recently got into programming, I started with python but moved to assembly and from there work my way through C, C++, C#, Java and go full circle to python
started with assembly cuz I think it will be good to start from the bottom to what is essentially one step up from machine code and work my way up through the more 'humanlike' languages

[nachiketjoshi]

Conclusion - It is better to learn assembly if you use C, C++ and for other languages its not really necessary.

[NativeBox]

Great, I’m in my second year for my B.S in electrical engineering and I’m taking assembly language and computer organization

[igrewold]

Kolibri OS ... written completely in assembly

[yOkay_]

I think it's good for deep learning of how computers work. Fetch decode execute cycle

[DorivalAfonsoCardoso]

not knowing assembly is living in the world of the matrix..but there are many happy people without knowing the real world

[worldshaper]

I want to understand the code of the universe. So I need to write a program or 2 in Assembly.

[andersemil]

I started programming as a teenager on Commodore 64 and Amiga in assembly language. Since then I got a job in the games industry and I started learning c and c++ but I still developed time critical loops in x86 and ARM assembly.
Today I mostly develop in C# and very much appreciate the comfort of sandboxing, garbage collection and cross-platform development. But I think all developers would benefit from just a basic introduction to machine code, stack pointers, interrupts and exception handling on low level.

[Antagon]

He looks exactly like I magine assembly programmer would look like.

[leandrolambardi]

Yes, if you want to be a badass programmer and learn a lot.

[goodwill]

Question is, if somebody is going to pay for that knowledge? Otherwise it is only for fun.

[andrewandrosow]

If you want do write device drivers, BIOSes, game engines, virtual engines (like JAVA engine), real-time digital signal processing, - you can learn it. But how many job vacancies are in the market?

[ChrisM]

As you correctly say, the requirement for assembly language knowledge in the professional field is absolutely context-linked. In a nutshell, the further abstracted your working language is from machine code then the less need to know assembly. A professional C/C++ programmer should(!!!) possess an expert level knowledge in assembly, for obvious reasons.

[RioYouvk]

Its worth if your interested in finding security holes