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onion2k • yesterday at 5:50 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.

I imagine that was x86, which was relatively easy but also horrible. Very few people are writing assembly today because you'd need to be able to do x86-64 SIMD, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V, which are all quite a bit more complicated.


Replies

seanmcdirmid • yesterday at 6:09 AM

MIPS, because of the books provided for computer architecture (Hennessy and Paterson) were written by the MIPs designers. No one I knew of learned X-86, the Dragon compiler book however had all its examples in VAX assembly.

kuschku • yesterday at 12:36 PM

We learnt MIPS assembly as part of the processor design class, where we built a DLX processor & emulated it running our code, and then we learnt x86 assembly as part of a class on debugging & reverse engineering (which is also where you'd usually have the good old bomblab assignment). That was in 2014.

fwip • today at 2:49 AM

Everyone else is saying MIPS, but we learned Motorola 68k Assembly. Which I suspect was mainly because we had a bunch of dev boards for it. It was fun starting off by toggling the lights, using the switches to make a primitive binary calculator, before leveling up to making programs than communicated over the serial port.

solyin • yesterday at 5:55 AM

It was MIPS for me, which isn't widely used in industry, but it did the job.