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It's interesting how ASM nowadays appears as a dark magic, since only a small fraction of the programmers are (rightfully) very far from that level.

Curiously, I found learning Rust way more challenging than learning 16-bit assembly (it was way simpler back then; no complex instructions, less baggage, simpler processors... and less expectations :)).

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I've learned x86 16-bit assembly originally, and I find that most of that knowledge is still applicable when looking at assembly listings while debugging C/C++ today (which is the most likely area where one might have to deal with it in production these days; few people get to write asm from scratch).

For x86, at least, I wouldn't even say that it was less complex. Segmented memory alone is a huge complication, and then on top of that there was all the legacy CISC stuff like the BCD helpers or ENTER/LEAVE; x64 is comparatively streamlined.

Yeah, segmented memory was such a headache. The large memory model that used "far" pointers broke some things that were taken for granted in C. Comparing pointers especially was an easy place to introduce difficult to find bugs. A given memory location could have multiple valid pointers, so you couldn't do an int compare. The 32-bit int 0x00000011 is smaller than 0x00010000 but 0000:0011 pointed to the byte after 0001:0000.

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