Poll - how much assembly programming do you do?

[BigEd]

Please vote in the poll!

(Even if most of your assembly programming was for some other processor, I still think it counts. But feel free to give more details.)

(If you happened to have coded in machine code for some reason, feel free to include that in your total.)

(If you'd like to tell a story about some huge coding binge that was longer than 12 months ago, feel free.)

[BitWise]

My PIC projects account for most of my code. I write in assembly on 8- and 16-bit PICS; 65C816 for the SXB board and 6800, SC/MP, CDP 1802, 6502, 65C02, and 8080 for my emulators.

[BigEd]

(I just realised that the responses from super-productive people might be intimidating to others - I don't mean to discourage anyone! If you're looking for a way to start, just visit easy6502 and run through the tutorial.)

[Rob Finch]

I do multiple thousands of lines of assembly language programming. Most of either boot bios or porting something like TinyBasic or Fig Forth to a new cpu core.

[floobydust]

I only write in assembly, 65C02, 8088/8086, Z80. Lately just the 65C02 and thousands of lines of code. BIOS, Monitor, utilities, code conversion, etc.

[Arlet]

I've only done little bits of assembly programming for FPGA based 6502/X18 cores. If a project doesn't involve an FPGA, it usually has an ARM Cortex, almost exclusively programmed in C.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

In 1987, I developed vertical software to run on a bunch of Commodore 128Ds multiplexed to a Xetec Lt. Kernal hard drive subsystem. I had to write a relational database engine running essentially at the bare metal, since some important multiuser features that were needed, e.g., file and record locking, didn't exist in the Lt. Kernal's DOS. By the time I completed the project the entire mess was close to 100,000 lines of assembly language—and not a single line of BASIC. At one point, I had to change a key definition in an INCLUDE file and thus had to reassemble every module in the package. Assembly took almost two days to complete. Fortunately, no power outage occurred while the assembler was churning away.

It is now some 38 years since I first wrote a 6502 assembly language program. I really can't fathom just how much assembly language I've written since then, but it wouldn't surprise me if I were closing in on 300,000 lines at this point in time (POC's firmware has some 12,000 lines of code in it). I'll likely be peering into a computer screen debugging 65C816 machine code when I take my last breath.

[mkl0815]

The current version of MOUSE has about 4000 lines of assembly code. About 1000 are mine, the rest was adapted code that I had to convert to the ophis syntax and that had to be adapted to my I/O routines.

[BigEd]

(I'm going to guess that there are plenty of people who've written very little who won't bother to vote, and some non-programmers who won't even read the topic. So, we wouldn't be getting any idea of the average, but we do get a feel for how many active programmers there are. And maybe some good stories too!)

[Martin_H]

I've mostly cut and pasted other people's assembly over the past year. So I've read hundreds of lines and code with "a few tens of lines" of customization. I imagine a similar metric happens with other people.

[BigEd]

Yes, I do much more tweaking than writing.

[teamtempest]

I'm going to say "none" because I can't remember doing any, though it's possible I wrote a few here and there and forgot about them. In any case not much 6502 assembler all.

Which is not to say I haven't programmed; I just used other languages!

[KC9UDX]

I wrote an assembler in Commodore BASIC, a long time ago. I assembled lots and lots of my own code with it over the years. Within the past few years, I've been working on porting my assembler to 6502 assembly.

In between there, I did do quite a bit of 8088 assembly as a PC hobbyist. I gave that up a long time ago.

I have written very small amounts of 68k and PowerPC assembly.

I taught myself 6502 assembly by writing my assembler, and by reverse engineering assembled program listings in COMPUTE!

My avatar is a picture of the file editor that goes with my assembler, which is not complete, but very workable. I ported that a couple years ago. The code seen there is the editor.

Everything I assemble gets assembled with my assembler, which is incredibly slow.

I should add I used to program a TMS1001 by assembling in my head!

[cbscpe]

I almost exclusivly programmed in assembler. Started with PDP-11 and VAX, later on IBM/370 as a professional programmer. Later when I switched to telecommunications I continued to use assembler in all my hobby projects. In the last two years mainly AVR and 6502. I must say I like assembler the most as it is the easiest to use when you need to bring up a system from scratch (that includes designing and building your own hardware). You really are the master of all bits and nothing unexpected can happen and you are sure when somthing goes wrong you are the reason for the issue and not any obscure logic in a higher programming language. Although I must say I really enjoyed the years I was programming in APL and I still think that APL is really cool.

[richard.broadhurst]

I only write assembler for the BBC Micro, and most of it over the last year has been simulators for bits of arcade hardware to allow the original game ROMs to run on the BBC Micro.
I do quite often find myself reading x86 when trying to debug various issues in windows, but would never bother writing any!