Post #2907499
2026-02-10 10:59 UTC
@aparrish@friend.camp i have been programming in assembly on the ZX81 recently (emulated), and i was thinking much the same. But also how it simultaneously makes me feel "hard" and "soft". Like "haha i am using this SBC A carry flag trick, no compiler would ever generated that" (it probably could tho), and also "oh no, i have no idea how many cycles an INC HL takes, and i have to look it up". Higher level languages are truly wondrous.
Replies (1)
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@suetanvil@freeradical.zone 2026-02-10 13:26
@aparrish@friend.camp @drj@typo.social I used to work for a tiny company that made dev tools. One of the more fun things I did there was to make a bit of a compiler runtime faster on a particular microcontroller. I started by writing it in C with a mostly non-optimizing compiler, figuring I'd tweak the resulting assembly code by hand. I ended up being able to get very good assembly code just by tweaking the C source (and also a C extension that let me pick registers).