practical reasons for learning assembly

I've been learning MIPS assembly and I'm wondering if there's any practical uses for it. Is there a lot of demand for people who write assembly these days? I've seen some job postings online looking for people to help write/debug embedded systems, but it doesn't seem like it's a very profitable skill to have compared to more high level stuff.

You want fast code? It's yours, my friend.

Terrible!

There's not much practical use outside embedded, operating systems and extreme optimizing (videogames, scientific computing). However it can still be helpful when debugging, and just knowing how computers actually work makes you a better programmer.

to hax the PSP you needed MIPS assembly

you never know when you will need it!

Learn!

>>4

It's not even used in videogames anymore really. With OpenGL and DirectX, there's no need to write 3d rendering routines in assembly like there used to be. The GPU, the drivers, and the API handle all of that at much higher speed and with greater compatibility (well, with opengl anyway)

However it is used extensively for cracking videogames as well as other software and it is necessary to know the basics of assembly for reverse engineering and writing fast code for embedded devices.

x86 assembly can be useful in certain scenarios; MIPS assembly is mostly worthless though. They teach it in schools because its easier to learn than x86 assembly.

>>6
The physics and math code can still benefit from assembly, although most of it can be accomplished with intrinsics - but intrinsics are not always available for the very latest instructions if you wanna give people with latest and greatest cpus come boost.

>>6
They teach it in schools because, unlike x86, it makes sense.

>>6
Videogames isn't all about graphics, you know. How's your Cod Blops Two campaign coming along? Got any more prestige yet?

USES FOR MIPS ASSEMBLY

- YOU CAN WRITE YOUR OWN BOOTLOADER FOR OLD SGI WORKSTATIONS
- OMG MAYBE I CAN HACK IOS ON A CISCO ROUTER TO DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN ROUTING
- 1995 CALLED I CAN MEAK PSX GAMEZ
- 1997 CALLED OMG MAYBE I CAN MAKE PROJECT64 ACTUALLY WORK
- 2000 CALLED I CAN MEAK PSP GAMEZ
- I AM A CHINESE CORPORATION TRYING NOT TO BE INTEL

THAT'S THE JOKE

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

>>11
cool /prog/ face, bro

>>6
how embedded are you talking about? i have had zero occasion to actually write anything significant in assembly for any of the embedded work i've done. clever use of __attribute__((always_inline)) or __attribute__((flatten)) or whatever the equivalent is for your desired compiler and being knowledgeable of what the compiler will output for your C or SEPPLES has served to result in easier to read code that is just as optimal as the handwritten asm solution would have been. the only caveat being that most of the work i've done is on ARM and NIOS which are relatively easy to compile for compared shit like PIC.

>>13
In Mesa3D there's a bit of inline ASM for command stream submission that heavily improves the time spent writing buffers in memory.
In *real* embedded systems (AVR, lol PIC) you will eventually have to do something in inline asm, even if it's just implementing some atomic operation wrt. interrupts.

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