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> can't even begin to write an assembler

An assembler is a 1-1 mapping. If you can read some text, and you can write some bytes, then you can write an assembler. Everything in between is just a case of reading the manual! It's just some ifs - if the user's written this instruction name, then emit these bytes.

I work on compilers and I'm awe of people who work on web apps because they genuinely seem far more complicated than what I do.

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I mean, there is usually a pass to resolve labels, right? So it's not quite that simple. But not far from it.

That depends on how fancy you want to be, you can definitely implement an assembler with relative branches and no labels.

familiarity is not the same thing as simplicity

No I think we can look at simplicity/complexity absolutely to some degree.

A compiler is a nice pure function - one array of bytes to another array of bytes. You need to use some algorithms and data structures in there to do that, but it's fundamentally simple.

A web app is fundamentally complex - asynchronicity, interacting with other services, network connections, all kinds of chaos.

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