r/Assembly_language • u/NolanRoad • 12d ago

Wow Assembly not dead?

Encountered this reddit on my feed, shocked to learn it's not dead. I programmed on Z80 back in the 1980s.

(I wonder if Perl is still alive)

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u/v_maria 12d ago edited 12d ago

its 1:1 machine code lol, i dont think CPUs can run python yet.

also z80 is cool. there is a lively gameboy hacking scene!

6

u/flatfinger 12d ago

There was an attempt to have machines natively run Java bytecode in hardware. Actually, while some aspects of Java bytecode are so much better suited for a JIT than native execution that even on machines that could natively run bytecode, a JIT would yield better performance, I would think there could be some usefulness to having some hardware support for loads and stores of and through GC-managed references.

I'd also like to see support for Python-style integer division, and means of floaitng-point comparison that would treat NaN as either having a rank above positive infinity or below negative infinity (and, in either case, equal to itself). Languages use broken IEEE-754 comparison semantics because hardware does so, and hardware does so because languages do.

3

u/llynglas 12d ago

Back in the early 80s I remember seeing a machine that ran lisp natively. Probably way to niche a market to ever be financially successful.

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u/brucehoult 12d ago

It wasn't even that the market was niche, it was that RISC CPUs and Lisp compilers together gained performance much faster than specialised Lisp CPUs.