alt Hacker NewsNeat. The author is about to stumble onto a secret.
> In Sum# > Abstractions. They don’t exist in assembler. Memory is read from registers and the stack and written to registers and the stack.
Abstractions do not exist periodi. They are patterns, but these patterns aren’t isolated from each other. This is how a hacker is born, through this deconstruction.
It’s just like the fact that electrons and protons don’t really exist. but the patterns in energy gradients are consistent enough to give them names and model their relationship. There are still points where these models fail (QM and GR at plank scale, or just the classical-quantum boundaries). It’s gradients all the way down, and even that is an abstraction layer.
Equipped with this understanding you can make an exploit like Rowhammer.
Abstractions pretty much exist and in assembler they matter even more because the code is so terse.
Now, there are abstractions (which exist in your brain, whatever the language) and tools to represent abstractions (in ASM you've got macros and JSR/RET; both pretty leaky).