alt Hacker NewsI notice that assembly language is not on this list. I've been working on a modern syntax for assembler, with C-like types[0], something of a successor to qhasm. I've written a race-the-beam renderer[1], which is a good fit because of its incredibly tight performance constraints. I've been doing a combination of coding by hand and Opus 5.5. Anecdotally, I find Claude can code in it just fine, something I'd like to make more quantitative.
Dan Luu has done that kind of evaluation[2], and found that LLMs do well in a range of languages, but do underperform in assembler. My hypothesis is that expressing programmer intent clearly, and having the compiler verify things like consistent placement of variables in registers, will fix the problems that hold LLMs back.
This has been a hobby project, but it feels ready to break containment. I'm open to a research opportunity where I'd be able to work on it for real - get in touch.
[0]: https://github.com/raphlinus/symbolasm
Symbolasm looks interesting. Without having tried it, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it would be a bit more complex for debugging, because you are using two different representations to do the same thing (one for writing code, one for reading it back). Not sure if this is an issue in practice.
Of course, the same issue exist in any compile language, say C, but you don’t expect to see C in a disassembly. Here you are working at the assembly level.