Am I seriously the only person on HN who doesn't know x86 backwards and forwards? Because it seems from the comments like I'm the only one here that didn't know this.
This was a good article, though.
This was a good article, though.
ALWAYS make sure you comment to let people know how smart you are. This is IMPERATIVE.
...even if you have to Google it a bit to brush up, always come back to let people know that you are knowledgeable.
In about 1997 I was really into hanging out in yahoo chat rooms and making websites. I was 11. I asked for a book on computer programming. I wanted to do something more than hack away at the perl scripts that ran my guest book. Neither my father or I really knew what I was asking. I received a nice book on PowerPC programming [0]. If I recall it read like assembly.
I still have the book on my bookshelf at home. I may have gotten 10% way through that book. It was quickly replaced with Sam's teach yourself perl in 24 hours.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/PowerPC-Programming-Intel-Programmers...
I'm not even kidding: Notepad should die in a fire.
Additionally, for those interested in the area of software security, this is a very useful layer to know well about, even if one has learned assembly language in another (popular) processor family. Knowing what features processors provide (like the support for virtual memory, among other things), and how they work, are also quite useful.
Saying those of us who didn't grow up on asm aren't true geeks rings of No True Scotsman to me.
In addition, just because we weren't born a decade earlier doesn't mean we think JS is low level. That's just a flat-out mischaracterization.
One problem is that I haven't found any handy tool that lets me just write and execute assembly without jumping through hoops.
As for convenient writing and execution of assembly, it depends on how low-level you want to go. You can write x86 asm on top of your unix or windows system relatively simply: Just write asm, and compile it with GAS/MASM/NASM/TASM/YASM. You'll need to know instructions, assembler syntax, and your OS's system call mechanism, as well as the calling conventions for any static or dynamic libraries you plan to use (except on systems where syscalls are not a formally exposed stable interface, like Solaris, where you only need learn the calling conventions for libraries). If you're utterly lost, and running Linux, I would recommend the excellent "Programming From The Ground Up," which is freely available online.
If you want to write atop the bare metal, with no OS, an emulator is your best bet. Virtualbox or QEMU both work, but whatever you pick, it'll be a bit of a pain to work with.