John Found - Slashdot User

Comment Re: Surprise? Why? (Score 1) 348

by John Found on Monday July 11, 2016 @04:23AM (#52487315) Attached to: TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly

People suck at macro optimizations in assembly. If your assembly program is more than 25 instructions, you're probably not going to do a better job than a compiler.

Maybe, but not optimized programs in assembly language are much faster than not optimized programs in high level languages. And as long as 99% of the code is not optimized, the result is predictable - the assembly language programs are faster almost always.

Comment Re:There are people widely using assembly language (Score 1) 348

by John Found on Monday July 11, 2016 @03:10AM (#52487121) Attached to: TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly

Assembly language programming is still alive and in good health even for x86 processors.
And there are projects written entirely in assembly language. Get some links:

FASM assembler.
FASM clone for ARM.
Advanded RAD IDE for FASM. (and FreshLib portable library)
RWASA - High performance, scalable web server.
MiniMagAsm - Small content management system (CMS).
AsmBB - High performance lightweight web forum software.
Kolibri OS - small and very fast operating system with GUI interface

I am not counting the small exercise projects here and there. I am not counting mixed language projects where assembly language is used together with high level languages.

The above is my post. I simply missed to login. ;) Some of the above projects are mine, some of other assembly programmers.
And if someone think assembly language is hard to code and support - simply look at the timeline of AsmBB. It has been written for a month in my spare time.
The timeline contains only 89 commits:

AsmBB timeline

Comment Re:Assembly is fast! (Score 1) 348

by John Found on Sunday July 10, 2016 @05:49PM (#52484943) Attached to: TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly

Most (not all) optimizations in assembly language make the code more simple and readable. But even non optimal assembly code is often faster than high level languages.

TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly (tiobe.com) 348

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday July 09, 2016 @07:33PM from the popularity-contest dept.

TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" measures the popularity of languages by the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. Their July report indicates that Assembly has become one of the 10 most popular languages: It might come as surprise that the lowest level programming language that exists has re-entered the TIOBE index top 10. Why would anyone write code at such a low level, being far less productive if compared to using any other programming language and being vulnerable to all kinds of programming mistakes? The only reasonable explanation for this is that the number of very small devices that are only able to run assembly code is increasing. Even your toothbrush or coffee machine are running assembly code nowadays. Another reason for adoption is performance. If performance is key, nobody can beat assembly code.
The report also noted that CFML (ColdFusion) jumped from #102 to #66, Maple from #94 to #74, and Tcl from #65 to #48. But Java still remains the #1 most-popular language, with C and C++ still holding the #2 and #3 positions. Over the last five years, C# and Python have risen into the #4 and #5 spots (made possible by PHP's drop to the #6 position) while JavaScript now holds the #7 position (up from #9 in 2011). Visual Basic .NET came in at #8, and Perl at #9.

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