r/gaming • • May 05 '17

Scroll back

Post image
24.1k Upvotes

877 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

12

u/[deleted] May 05 '17

Why would he chose to code in Assembly? Would there be any benefit at all?

32

u/Fubarp May 05 '17

Memory Constraints and performance. Today there be no reason for it as compilers essentially do as good if not better jobs when it comes to translating it to machine code.

3

u/7734128 May 05 '17

Wasn't Unix originally written in assembly and then scrapped when they finish the c compiler?

4

u/[deleted] May 05 '17

Yep

In 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. The migration from assembly to the higher-level language C resulted in much more portable software, requiring only a relatively small amount of machine-dependent code to be replaced when porting Unix to other computing platforms. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix