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Asked: 2026-05-14T06:47:22+00:00

It seems to be a mainstream opinion that assembly programming takes longer and is

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It seems to be a mainstream opinion that assembly programming takes longer and is more difficult to program in than a higher level language such as C. Therefore it seems to be recommend or assumed that it is better to write in a higher level language for these reasons and for the reason of better portability.

Recently I’ve been writing in x86 assembly and it has dawned on me that perhaps these reasons are not really true, except perhaps portability. Perhaps it is more of a matter of familiarity and knowing how to write assembly well. I also noticed that programming in assembly is quite different than programming in an HLL. Perhaps a good and experienced assembly programmer could write programs just as easily and as quickly as an experienced C programmer writing in C.

Perhaps it is because assembly programming is quite different than HLLs, and so requires different thinking, methods and ways, which makes it seem very awkward to program in for the unfamiliar, and so gives it its bad name for writing programs in.

If portability isn’t an issue, then really, what would C have over a good assembler such as NASM?

Edit:
Just to point out. When you are writing in assembly, you don’t have to write just in instruction codes. You can use macros and procedures and your own conventions to make various abstractions to make programs more modular, more maintainable and easier to read. This is where being familiar with how to write good assembly comes in.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ASM has poor legibility and isn’t really maintainable compared to higher-level languages.

    Also, there are many fewer ASM developers than for other more popular languages, such as C.

    Furthermore, if you use a higher-level language and new ASM instructions become available (SSE for example), you just need to update your compiler and your old code can easily make use of the new instructions.

    What if the next CPU has twice as many registers?

    The converse of this question would be: What functionality do compilers provide?

    I doubt you can/want to/should optimize your ASM better than gcc -O3 can.

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