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Asked: 2026-05-16T03:04:32+00:00

So I’ve never done any assembly programming (although I did some reading/reasoning out the

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So I’ve never done any assembly programming (although I did some reading/reasoning out the results from small segments of x86 and arm assembly in CS classes).

I’m sort of curious how people do serious assembly programming both in the days when c/other (barely) high level languages were considered too slow and today.

Do people use High-level assembler?

Some sort of textual macros?
Comments on every line?

Do people make call stacks according to team agreed on conventions?
Do they tend to use text editors or some sort of ide?

and any other interesting stuff.

P.S. Also how do you deal with strings(probably simply ascii), and structs/unions(compositee data types) (ie how to simplify writing the code to create and manipulate them)?

P.P.S. Do people frequently call into OS provided c library functions from assembly?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The easiest and most important answer to your question “How do you program in assembler?”:

    As you want. That is the main reason for doing assembly. Control. To have it your way, so to speak.

    • HLA is obsolete.
    • Macros can help with tedious and/or verbose tasks such as calling functions and defining import sections. Use with care, though. If you use them too much it can make your code unreadable to others.
    • Comments on every line? No. Microcommenting hurts assembly language, as every line not necessarily is one complete functional block.
    • If you make your own calls, do them the way you think is best. Often you work against an already established API/ABI with set calling conventions, such as WinAPI.
    • The line between “text editor” and “ide” is blurred, as many text editors have ide functionality. According to my definition, the main difference is that the ide has a built-in debugger.
    • As you don’t have any standard library to help you with string manipulation, you would have to make your own, or use some kind of function library, perhaps the Operating System’s, if available.
    • Working with structures is no different in assembly.

    Edit:

    • Yes, some people like to use the C functions in Windows through msvcrt.dll, for example. I would believe it to be true in the Unix world too 🙂
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