Comments on: C Is The New Assembly

By: agnosticj

agnosticj — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:49:16 +0000

The 8086 has a 16bit bus, much larger than the 8088′s 2-nibble bus. All things being equal (same code), the 8086 will do it faster.

By: Aakash Sharma

Aakash Sharma — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:59:33 +0000

Can anybody tell me that in which microprocessor 8086 or 8088 a far procedure call will execute faster and why???

Send me reply @ akkuf117@gmail.com

By: Coders2020

Coders2020 — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:21:53 +0000

Some amazing informative comments here. Post bookmarked and I am glad that I come here. And as already pointed out, C can be an alternative not a replaement. You will still need assembly when you work at microcontroller level

By: L

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:45:37 +0000

To the guy who praised AppleScript’s syntax:

lol k

By: Scott Andrew

Scott Andrew — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:33:40 +0000

We use C++ and C for commercial Windows UI development. On the mac we have Objective C and C++. We have looked at things like XAML/C# for Windows and the problem with those languages are two fold, at least in our programs. Our engine is all crossplatform C++ for video encoding and such. In a higher level language you have to write a wrapper which adds overhead and performance cost if you are moving over that boundry repeatedly.

These langauges are also in effecient with memory. C# will keep eating memory until it can’t then garbage collect. There is something about having control over my foot print and being able to clear memory as needed that is nice. XAML has huge overhead on the windows side and is fairly slow. Quite a few things were hacked on XP from what i understand. We’ll take our C++ WTL based framework right now over C# 3.0 and XAML for high end apps.

As far as is C++ I think yes it is to a point. It also has its place when doing basic applications if you are looking for crossplatform support. Our engine is all crossplatform C++. I can take any of our components in the engine and complie it for windows/mac/linux/bsd… C++ won’t go the way of the dinosaur, interpretive languages have their place, but they aren’t efficent enough for large scale commercial applications yet, I don’t think.

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 09:16:00 +0000

Looking for something better (than C, C++, …) could start here http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ocaml/

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:40:28 +0000

You still need Assembly when you work with micro controllers with 1kb of memory or so :)

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:38:31 +0000

>And it’s also one of the reasons why I hate C++ templates:
>because it violates the rule that C (and C++ without
>templates or exceptions) should translate everything
>you write into a few (and intuitively easy to divine)
>machine language instructions.

I’ve been saying for years that C++ has lost its way: the standards committee is besotted with trying to make C++ something it was never meant to be, by bolting on one kludge after another. The best example of that is boost.org, which does things in C++ that seem impossible, at the expense of long compiles, unreadable, unmaintainable, and especially undebuggable code that’s a few lines shorter but takes longer to write.

(I do respect the the inventors of template metaprogramming, Design Patterns, and Processes, though: they’re the ones who saw the future early and created new territory to be highly paid gurus of, or tenured teachers of.)

What comes out of this discussion that’s hopeful is that a lot of people seem to realize that, and are looking for something better.

By: Kevin Kitching

Kevin Kitching — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:22:20 +0000

Even when I learned programming in ’89, assembly was something you learned because you might still need it, but avoided if you could…mostly because even then tightly written C could do most things nearly as fast, and with 1/10th the coding time.

That’s not to say that one of my class projects, a programmer’s text editor, didn’t contain alot of assembly … we were required to use only modules we developed ourselves. And some of the base functionality … pop-up menus and the like … had to be written in assembly. But the top level stuff, linked lists and file system stuff…no way. I’d still be banging away at the keyboard of that XT today trying to get it right.

Assembly’s still a good club to have in your bag, if for nothing other than background.

By: kokorozashi

kokorozashi — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:43:32 +0000

You want the big picture? Try this on for size:All languages in common use today are done. Clock speeds have stopped increasing and the future is about parallelism. None of today's languages is up to the task of expressing parallel notions, which, for the sake of clarity, are more difficult than threads, which are already difficult enough. It's going to be an interesting ride. Eventually, the C of parallelism will appear. It isn't going to be any of these dynamically typed scripting languages which scale terribly and are really just ways to aggregate extensions written in C. Most people won't have expected it, but suddenly it will be here after Pixar reveals it divided the rendering time of their latest feature by ten.We now return you to your regularly scheduled complacency. :-)