I had a couple assembly programming classes during my CS course in university. It's definitely a much different way of writing programs compared to higher level languages. To me, it felt like a puzzle game, where management of "position" within memory was a huge part of it. Function calls are also interesting, since essentially it's just a block of code in memory with a pointer you can jump to, then jump back to your previous position once finished. Even a program to just do simple math was quite involved. No such thing as strings either, just char arrays. Funny enough, taking that class on assembly finally helped me "get" C. All the stuff about pointers and memory management/allocation didn't click until writing assembly, then I understood what it was for. Looking at C as an abstraction over assembly really helped me become a better programmer.
This gave me an idea for an actual puzzle game where you use simple opcodes to move numbers between boxes and it gets more and more complicated until you realise that you’re writing assembly
Yep, C is basically a better macro assembler. I feel your heureka moment! I came from the other direction, and it took a while to get what C was actually good for :)
@@archmad Its hyped because it allows you to write web applications with all (or the majority of) Javascript abstracted away. I would never go back after using blazor wasm. Its just miles easier to write good code and you get access to powerful tools like resharper / nuget ecosystem ontop of anything javascript.
@@ZephrymWOW as much as i love wasm for what it allows, i must say my experience with it supposedly eradicating the need for js has proved that it isn't really finished. WebAssembly seems to focus too much on being 'headless', being able to be run without the web browser nor even js enviorement, completely ignoring that this is the whole point of why it was created in the first place. Every single possible action you'd want to perform in javascript can indeed be performed using wasm, but only after you: 1. Import the functions needed. 2. If they have anything to do with strings, go through thousands of loopholes to get them right for both the wasm memory and js memory. 3. Only then call said functions within your wasm. It results in that either you or your enviorement/build tools (emscripten, wasm-pack, etc) *will* end up generating a *huge* mess of a "glue" javascript file that does the thing your web browser should have done in the first place. This is completely unnecessary and shouldn't be a problem in the first place, yet it is. Thus every website implementing webassembly will come with these giant files that will sacrifice the page loading times, cache space and overall both user and programmer experience. One step forwards, two steps backwards. I love yet i hate it. It's awesome.
@@beProsto 1.) You are misusing dependency injection. You can enable everything globally and it will be injected as needed. It's a better version of web pack. 2.) Give me a real example of your talking out of your ass parroting someone else. 3.) Its headless because of MAUI. You can just use a blazor dll and now you have xplatform THAT RUNS ON KERNEL. Every other alternative spins up a chromium container and is a glorified browser.
Always wanted to learn Assembly, but never have I understood it's complexity. You simply explained the most basic part of the Assembly language in 100 seconds clearly. Thanks! I might use this for future references!
Hey! It helps to start learning assembly on older chips that were less complicated. In my Uni we work with assembly on 8051 microcontrollers. They are quite old, but it's easier to grasp the basics on them. Overall, architectures used in microcontrollers tend to be a bit easier to understand than x86.
You should go ahead and learn it. I personally feel that my ability to debug things and make programs work increased after working on some simple projects in which I coded in assembly language. I would say that instead of learning about x86 assembly language, you should learn asm of Arduino Uno/Atmega328p. That is where I started. It is simple, and when those LEDs blinks, you get a feel of what it means to write assembly and how stuff works.
I'd highly recommend starting with a RISC instruction set like ARM. It's a reduced instruction set so it will be a lot less confusing than x86 when you are just starting out. Derek Banas has a pretty good video to get you started: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ViNnfoE56V8.html
2 года назад
Learning an assembly language is pretty useful to better understand how a computer operates, I would also recommend going for a RISC architecture, they tend to have less instructions and more registers and I feel that helps reducing the complexity to start doing something nice, even if it is just adding 2 numbers and saving the result in a third registry. The one I first started with, many years ago, was the MIPS 3000 variant, that was the cpu used in the PlayStation 1 and very similar to the one used in the Nintendo 64.
Assembly is simple, it consist of simple instructions. The complexity comes from trying to program more than adding two numbers together. You need alot of instructions, to construct higher level logic, take care of program state, access memory, data structures. Then you need to understand many registers in the processor, how talk with all the peripherals and so on. It's easier to start with microcontroller and move from there. I enjoyed the AVR architecture, it's 8-bit CPU with about 100 instructions. But the whole processor datasheet can have 500 pages for all the various modules like analog to digital converter or serial interface.
While I was studying digital electronics, I used to count binary digits with my hands. People gave me weird looks, but hey, you can easily count up to 32 with one hand.
0:46 WebAssembly should not be confused with normal Assembly dialects like x86. It is much more of a compilation target than a language you would actually want to write in for performance reasons.
I would say that the WebAssembly text representation totally qualifies as an assembly language for the WebAssembly binary representation. Also, you can also theoretically create actually hardware that runs WebAssembly binaries, it's just that it's intended use case is to run it on a VM, similar to Java.
Assembly only looks complicated to the beginners but it's really not. MASM even provides high level directives like IF, ELSE, WHILE and standard macros for I/O that makes it really straight forward to focus on the performance of your algorithm.
@@eUnkn0wn you can write inline assembly in C if you want, difference is of performance and control over your code, bit shifting and direct access to stack frame and hardware. You can't do that with C
I had a tutor back in the mid-90s when I was just a teen hanging out on the local BBS... he always said "it's all rather simple", and I never got it and was wholly confused. Until one day when it just clicked and I realized all you're doing is reading, changing, and writing values to memory or output ports, and whatever is there interprets it; like the value 10 can be a green pixel in video memory.
@@raz0229 There is a talk by Matt Godbolt "What has my compiler done for me lately" (or somesuch), where he demonstrates really well how unlikely you are to optimize better than your compiler at this point. Besides C is basically just that: High-level assembler. Not saying that dabbling in ASM doesn't have its place, but personally I needed it mostly for debugging.
WE did assembly language one semester in my University CS days in a 8085 or 8086 Microprocessor kit. We needed to check the chart referring to codes which had instructions. It was fun doing until you miss one step and repeat all over again.
I am sure there is some other language he didn't covered.... otherwise tomorrow another language will born... Does he covered "V"? The new replacement of go....
A quick correction: the bss section is for variables whose size is known but data is not. We reserve space for variables in the bss section with resb (reserve byte). The data section is for variables whose initial value is known, and the rodata (read only data) section is for constants
Man. Your videos are so clean. So precise. No junk. No dumb intro that lasts 10 seconds. You title it perfectly as well. Thank you for adding junk-free material to the internet.
also, .data is not for constants that do not change, it's basically an initialised version of the .bss section that takes up space in the executable. you can actually change it. for actual constants that do not change, use .rodata. Interesting video though :)
that takes up space *in the executable*. .bss, .data and .rodata all take up space in memory, the difference is that .bss is not stored in the executable but initialized with all zero bits by the executable file loader.
I started my software journey in middle school reverse engineering, so I studied x86 assembly, PE architecture, stack smashing, etc. It was SO interesting to me, I would print out Iczelion tutorials and bring them to class to study. It brings back so many happy memories ❤
A small but important caveat: in most use cases, assembly still sits above the OS / kernel. So you won't work with actual physical memory ("bare metal") but with virtual memory; an abstraction provided by the OS. An exception might be when you are programming in kernel space.
At 'computer school' I had to write an assembly compiler (in C)... The exercise/project was called 'Microsim'. Also, store the assembly code at sector 0 of a floppy, and you got yourself a booting program 😄
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven, you must become a new creation and be born again by responding to the Holy Spirit. - Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:15-16 cf. Hebrews 10:26-29. Pay close attention to your thoughts and how you respond to your inner monologue because it has a greater impact than you think. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life, and do all that you can to follow His ways.
@@benc589 Funny you say that. Jesus never claimed divinity and he rejects people calling in his name instead of The Father (The God Above) in many passages of the Bible. Should the god deserve being called and worship? Why don't you worship the one who sent Jesus? And believe in the ways of His Final Prophet Muhammad? The prophet that has been prophesized in the scriptures?
0:06 Actually that's what hexadecimal is for. Hex is far easier to count than binary. What assembly is for is to remember the instructions' names instead of their number. That's literally it. Without assembly programmers would likely remember instructions in hex rather than binary anyways. In fact if you deassemble a program you not only see the assembly instructions generated by the compiler but it shows you those instructions in hex instead of binary.
eyyy i use ASM a lot for my little z80 computer i made. this is a nice video to help explain what im doing to other people. it also makes my work a little more appreciated because now some people have the context to know how much work i put into it. Thanks for this because i suck at explaining things >.>
I didn't know this, Chris Sawyer, wow! And it's an awesome game, the kids loved it. Reminds me of Eric Chahi writing Another World for the Amiga. A masterpiece, which he wrote alone. Some computer games are really impressive examples what one or two persons can accomplish.
Former communication engineer with what was once the BBC World Service... The sender control system at transmitter sites was written in Assembly which controlled banks of microcontrollers which in turn controlled the sender transmission schedule. Even in 2000 that was an arcane system of control. That said it was reliable. The software manual which contained all the instructions for the control system was as dense as a doorstep. The programmer who designed the code could be found lay belly down on the floor of the sender control system rapidly flipping through the hundreds of pages of instructions from the system manual to try to find bugs. They knew their code structure inside out and back the front. An amazing feat given that there was no IDE or such like at the time of it's original development (80's) - simply amazing human memory and knowing instantly every line of code and where it sat in the overall program. We don't know we're born these days.
Note: The method you used to write your hello world program here wasn't really "just" assembly (which is understandable, since writing a miniature operating system for a '100 Seconds of'-video is probably out of scope). You still used the kernel-specific API calls.
TBF if you run something in a modern operating system you HAVE to use API calls (called system calls) for anything that isn't just calculations. Otherwise you'd segfault. So unless you want to install DOS or create your own ring 0 OS because you want to build the third temple on your computer or something. You gotta accept that nothing you write will truly be "in assembly".
@@mrmimeisfunny At my job we don't use a operating system (well, we make our own RTOS), instead we program an SPI link to a PuTTY-linked peripheral and printf by sending data down the SPI line. So you can do printf without any API/syscalls, but bugger me is it hard work
@@mrmimeisfunny I should have clarified that I know that there's really no other way to do this (without writing your own os). Would not exactly be great if any program could just run any instructions it wants to without restrictions (through syscalls/an API).
Insane to know the original pokemon games were written in assembly. Then the absolute madman, Satoru Iwata, optimized the fire out of them and fit a whole other game into the cartridge. RollerCoaster Tycoon too, and that was one person!
The madlad did it - and even flavoured the like and subscribe again! I have been looking at Gameboy assembly for a long time, mainly for the GameBoy and GameBoy Color. Starting with the GBA, you can use ARM instruction sets and the tooling for both is pretty incredible (sdcc, lcc, z80sdk, ...). It sure is far different from writing nice looking code, but if you want to get something critical done, then your best way of achieving it, is to skip every and all abstractions and go bare metal via Assembly. :)
Actually DevKitArm and GBDK is the way most people go nowadays and some people actually managed to make impressive stuff with it thanks to the layer of abstraction. We're seeing more and more people make games for those platforms and part of the reason is excellent support for the C programming language. Now, if only CC65 was actually just as nice...
@@doigt6590 GBDK uses SDCC and I personally am still waiting for it to actually support C99... I wanted to try and use V which compiles to C, but because of ampersand statements, it makes SDCC error out a lot. But, DevkitARM/-PPC is amazing! I have those installed too. Personally, I am impressed how many unofficial SDL ports there are for some of those handhelds, which is pretty amazing!
I got my start with MIPS32 in university and I'm currently learning 6502 assembly just for fun. It's a really fun CPU to learn and the X16 uses it just like the C64.
I learned MIPS in university as well, does it matter what version of assembly we learn? When starting out I was so confused on the difference between arms and mips, and when searching tutorials they never showed what I was learning in class. I want to learn assembly but don't know what version to go with.
@@sergiohernandez72 That depends on why you want to learn it. If you want to understand the concepts, it doesn't matter. Learn any or preferably several of them (to see the differences). You might even want to have a look at completely synthetic ones (like MIX or DLX) or byte-codes like Pascal's or Java's. If you want to write real-world code in assembly (to make if faster or smaller or remove side-channels) then you would learn the assembly language of a processor in wide use: x86_64, ARM, some microcontroller, maybe a GPU ...
Literally how are these videos this good? Absolutely fantastic! The graphics were great, the pacing was on point, and the narration is just down-right awesome.
Im here to learn how difficult it was for Chris Sawyer to make Rollercoaster Tycoon. He wrote 98% of the code in assembly, by himself. An absolute legend.
@@davidl.7383 as C++ is on a higher level of abstraction, plus the fact that it's a "superset" of C, it make it difficult to really understand the mechanics behind the language and it has a really steep learning curve. Assembly is basicslly simple oprations with basic logic. But at the end, it will obviously be easier to make an app in C++ rather than in assembly.
I grew up with the C64. You could relative simply write Basic programs, which was great but they were quite slow. Assembler (for the 6502) was difficult to learn (even more without the possiblity to get information via the internet, you needed books, books, books...) but gave you a lot more possibilities and exponentially more speed. Note that with assembly language you don't only have to learn the instructions (mnemonics) and how to build routines, but also how to use libraries or the system custom chip architecture with all of its registers and how they work. Using Assembler was a must for quality and speed. And so, on 8 bit systems like the C64 nearly all of the commercial software was written in this tedious but fast language. Note that the detail information from 1:00 in the video is for x86 assembly, which runs on modern pc systems but is ... as a language a bit clunky. If you want to try out assembly yourself I'd recommend 6502 asm f.e. for the C64, which is pure 8 bit oldschool. Or 68k assembly f.e. on the AtariST or Amiga. It's nearly orthogonal, which means it's a good/nice assembler dialect imho. Compared to 6502 asm this 16-bit assembly is a bit more powerful and convenient. Btw. Winuae is a good Amiga emulator and Asmone a good assembler to start with.
z80 asm is my favourite, i used to do small games on my ti-84 calc with this, and there's some insane programs made in assembly for this machine, while the basic is just about using the functions to draw math stuff and things like this, the processor is a 15mhz z80 (while the gameboy is a 4mhz one) and assembly programs can use all of the archive memory, aka about 480ko (with 24ko of ram)... there's programs like a doom "port", a gameboy emulator or games simulating 9-level grayscale (there's no native support for grayscale on this machine), all of them entirely made in asm
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven, you must become a new creation and be born again by responding to the Holy Spirit. - Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:15-16 cf. Hebrews 10:26-29. Pay close attention to your thoughts and how you respond to your inner monologue because it has a greater impact than you think. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life, and do all that you can to follow His ways.
I like to use intel 80386/80387 32 bit CPU. Today on an Android tablet with a Dosbox emulator app. I put all instructions into batch file to create tiny executable with a little help from debug.
I disagree that 65xx Assembly was difficult to learn. The Programmer's Reference Guide from Commodore covered pretty much anything you would want or need to know... and at least there was no need to deal with segments and offsets, as with x86 Assembly. If you used an Assembler (like PAL)... the landscape was even easier.
@@TheUtuber999 To have some 16 bit offset register on x86 are easier to handle as two bytes in the zero page of the C64 for building an address. On C64 we have a lot of calculation with 16 bit values, but only 3 register with 8 bit.
Having developed programs for Intel 8086, I can say that the language helped me to understand the low level workings of a program built with a high-level language (like C++, Python)
This video inspired me to start learning assembly, and I thank you for that! I'm currently on multiplication, and know some basics about number comparaison ! (cmp, je, jne, jse, etc)
If you want to start out Assembler, take 68000 - life is so much easier there (compared to x86, or even Z80). 6502 might be similarly simple, since it's basically RISC.
tbh learning to read x86 assembly is pretty easy but when it comes to actually using all those specialized instructions like "CVTTPS2PI" (god i hate SSE) its quite overwhelming
Being a child of the 80's home computer revolution my first programming language was Basic on my Commodore 64. The second was MOS 6510 Assembly language. The learning curve was *steep* for a 13-year old with no access to the internet. But what I learned then has been useful to this day (I am now 52). M68K Assembly on the Amiga is still the most fun I have had developing software. It's a beautiful instruction set and the Amiga had great custom chips that could do amazing things. It still does today!
I am a long-time coder whose first commercial products were written in 100% assembly. One of the things in this video that raised my eyebrows is the explanation of what a CPU "register" is. Do modern developers / coders / software engineers (you young things below the age of, say, 30) not understand the basics of CPU structure/organization? Do schools/colleges/universities still teach this, or are we letting our future software developers into the world thinking that a CPU is a magic black box that "just works"?
please keep in mind that a significant portion of viewers who watch these video is self-taught programmer who just want to get things done and in the context of current development toolchain that make a thousand abstract layer between code and bare metal i can see why they need him to explain what a register even is
I studied physics. It is much more useful to just think of things as stuff that just works. We only wanted our equations to be solved and show us pretty graphs. The world is changing and if someone wants to know the lowest level stuff possible, that is great. This skillset is still needed. However, things that people expect of newer technology, like video games for example, can't be written 100% in assembly within 3 lifetimes. The world needs both kinds of people.
Dude i can understand your concern but, ypu know what there are books in schools and universities where they teach you about things like how data is stored in floppy drives, older computers, older ball mouse. and there exist people who complain that the computer world has become more updated/agile/evolving there ain't so much time to learn about all these useless stuff. so it's up to individual's preference if they want to know about these things in deep or not.
I graduated with a CS degree last year. We had a few subjects related to the CPU architecture (including ALU theory), binary logic and discrete math. And yes, it had very little correlation with the programming we were doing.
Level 4 (first year) at a UK university here. Can confirm we learned that CPUs do indeed have buses, caches, clocks, etc. in them. Can also confirm that we didn’t go into more detail than that and that the magical things inside of the magical box just work.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Just to to print on a screen we needed 3 or 4 short coded lines... You had to code the mechanics of dividing numbers, etc...
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven, you must become a new creation and be born again by responding to the Holy Spirit. - Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:15-16 cf. Hebrews 10:26-29. Pay close attention to your thoughts and how you respond to your inner monologue because it has a greater impact than you think. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life, and do all that you can to follow His ways.
x86 runs on amd too, intel came up with the architecture, but they're not the only ones using it, same with amd64, which was made by amd but intel uses it too
Hey Jeff do you plan on making a glsl in 100 seconds video or a tutorial? I've been playing with it for a bit with ThreeJS and I'm surprised you haven't made a video about it yet. I really love your videos and watch them as soon as you post them, keep up the good work!
You have so many things wrong. You can modify thigs in the .data section, the .rodata section you can't however. Most importantly, sections are not predefined, they are part of the ELF standard. You have many more, such as .rodata and .bss. Also, most importantly, webasm != asm...
I took assembly language course in my bachelors degree but i had a really hard time passing the course and honestly, now i just got the hang of it in less than 2 mins... kudos @fireship my number one tech channel
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven, you must become a new creation and be born again by responding to the Holy Spirit. - Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:15-16 cf. Hebrews 10:26-29. Pay close attention to your thoughts and how you respond to your inner monologue because it has a greater impact than you think. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life, and do all that you can to follow His ways.
Instead of playing outside or hanging out and drinking with so called friends in my teens and early 20s, I learnt C and assembler in DOS. Spent years working on stuff and plugging in ASM here and there to make things faster.
Repent and follow Jesus my friend! Repenting doesn't mean confessing your sins to others, but to stop doing them altogether. Belief in Messiah alone is not enough to get you into heaven, you must become a new creation and be born again by responding to the Holy Spirit. - Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:15-16 cf. Hebrews 10:26-29. Pay close attention to your thoughts and how you respond to your inner monologue because it has a greater impact than you think. Call on the name of Jesus and pray for Him to intervene in your life, and do all that you can to follow His ways.
Used to love coding in assembler. Used mainly machine code monitors for the lack available assemblers (the software) for the C-128. Once i got an old 286 as a sidekick i started using tasm as a cross assembler. Hacked together a parallel data cable to transfer my compiled code to my favourite 8-bitter. Good ol' times :-D
Hey, quick question: If I wanted to make my own programming language without using LLVM , does this mean I have to use Assembly language ? (Assembly 86 or Assembly 64) . You know, to create the compiler ? Thank you very much.
You can write your compiler for your programming lanuage in any turing complete language, it doesn't matter. The first C compiler was of course written in assembly, but then with the parts of C that were already compilable, the compiler was rewritten in C eventually (this is called bootstrapping).
Yes. If you use LLVM, you are responsible for emitting LLVM IR which resembles a low level programming language. After producing that, you feed it to lc (LLVM's compiler backend) which performs many optimizations and finally outputs assembly for many different architectures. If you don't use LLVM, you have to output architecture-specific assembly. It is a great learning opportunity. You can also target another high-level language like C if you want.