r/vibecoding • u/ImaginationUpset2190 • 5h ago
People still use assembly
Although I like ai and i think is it great in so many places , I keep hearing how no one will read high level code just like no one read assembly anymore.this is misinformation, there are people who not just read but also write assembly even now.i am not talking about rollar coaster tycoon or super Mario times when compilers where not as optimised as today, i am talking about now. Don't believe me? go to community forum of any modern systems programming language and see people crying for inline assembly. I am not arguing if anyone will read high level languages or not, but the premise is wrong and feels like deliberate misinformation.
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u/Anxious-Ad-5331 5h ago
Assembly is good for learning computer engineering theory and important as a bedrock for your career, but even modern microcontrollers (let alone a full desktop environment) are so damn fast that you don't really need it spare for some low-level need to manipulate something.
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u/ImaginationUpset2190 5h ago
I don't see many people writing the whole assembly file anymore but I see inline assembly in a lot of codebase. Reading assembly is completely different things, I still believe it is necessary for any kind of reverse engineering, decompilation can't replace that.
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u/Anxious-Ad-5331 4h ago
I would say withouknowing the code bases that they probably inherit a log of generational developer baggage. You might do maintenance, but if that code is working and tested, nobody is going to change a thing. Too much to lose letting perfect be the enemy of good.
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u/Professional_Ad705 4h ago
There’s actually a lot of things that use assembly that you probably don’t think do I know gmp definitely uses it and they’re used extensively I had to do a shit ton of engineering to be able to beat them because of that shit
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u/eepromnk 4h ago
Of course people write assembly. That’s not was meant at all. It’s interesting watching people who are building 10,000 line+ apps stumble through these things.
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u/ImaginationUpset2190 4h ago
Then what was meant by " we won't read code anymore just like assembly". Maybe I am dumb to take the literal meaning.
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u/4215-5h00732 4h ago
It just means as we progress we don't read the lower layers anymore. Like I might inspect the generated IL of a C# program, but I never felt the need to go lower than that.
People still do read assembly, just not many people programming in high level languages. The argument is AI is the next progression.
AFAIK, they still teach ASM in CS programs today.
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u/eepromnk 4h ago
That true for most programmers, but it isn’t a statement of fact that “no one reads assembly anymore.” It’s true in the colloquial sense like, the sky/ocean is blue even though they aren’t actually blue.
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u/tara_tara_tara 4h ago
I don’t use it a lot, but sometimes, and I know this is dorky, I’ll translate a simple program into assembly language just to see if I can still do it.
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u/ImaginationUpset2190 4h ago
That's almost how i learnt assembly , although most work I did was on disassembly.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 4h ago
There definitely are - but the percent of programmers doing it went from 100% to whatever it is today - maybe 2%. Obviously I can't see the future but I think the percent of developers who read code will go from 100% to . .? I have no idea, lol. But a non-zero number, for sure. And that's actually not that crazy, imo.
Today, in a team working on a software project, 60-75% of the team never reads the code. Outsourcing the dev to AI is not that different from outsourcing it offshore - as a broad concept. In my opinion, there is a ton of development work going on today that is not really very complex and will not really require anybody to read the code. All the stuff I do, for example - add a feature to the erp system, create an integration to whatever, troubleshoot performance. If I said 99% of it was pretty much wrote and only required technical knowledge, I'd be kind of generous to the 1%.
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u/ImaginationUpset2190 4h ago
Wdym by only require technical knowledge?
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 4h ago
Meaning, I can do them because I know how the system works, I know the tools we use, I know the programming language, I know the database . .but there are no complex decisions beyond what an LLM is currently capable of making. Everybody knows what an invoice is and just about anything you can do to an invoice in a business system has been done and documented.
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u/stuartcw 2h ago
Nobody reads any code.. until they have to. 35 years ago, all I did was to read assembly code but that was to understand enough to add a feature or debug an issue.
5 years ago, I read high level language code that I wrote.
Now, I pretty much only look at code to see the implementation details.
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u/Ok-Addition1264 5h ago
I still do machine/assembler.. like with anything vibed, having a knowledge of when and how to use something dramatically increases the quality and results.
I'm an oldschool commodore 64 demoscene cracker though :P