alt Hacker News> Reading this thread leaves me with the impression that most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment. It sucks!
It absolutely sucks. But it's not scary. In my world (Zephyr RTOS kernel) I routinely see people go through all kinds of contortions to build abstractions around what are actually pretty straightforward hardware interfaces. Like, here's an interrupt controller with four registers. And here's a C API in the HAL with 28 functions and a bunch of function pointer typedefs and handler mechanics you're supposed to use to talk to it. Stuff like that.
It's really common to see giant abstractions built around things that could literally be two-instruction inline assembly blocks. And the reason is that everyone is scared of "__asm__".
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Yeah, but doesn't the Zephyr device tree abstraction actually expect you to do that? I mean, I appreciate the elegance and the desire for portability, but all I could think of as I read those docs was "here's a couple months of work for something that should take ten minutes."
This exactly. If you are doing embedded programming, direct register access and manipulation is often a far, far superior option, and you don’t have to be some kind of “assembly sensei” to do it if you just have a very basic idea of how things work. It doesn’t mean you write programs in assembly… it means when you are needing to do something that the hardware is going to do for you anyway, you know how to ask for it directly without having to load a 2Kloc library. This is especially true when using python or JS bytecode on the MCU. Actually, using python with assembly is really the best of both worlds in many cases.