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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

A good macro assembler allows to write code on an abstraction level that's not much different from C though ;)

What actually makes C a high-level language isn't the language, but the optimizer passes in modern C compilers.

Optimizations are enabled by the semantics of the language. If the language mandated that generated code must conform exactly to specific sequences of operations dictated by the source code, instead of merely respecting the observable behavior of the abstract machine, it would be impossible to optimize C code in the same way that it's impossible to optimize Assembly code.

What macro assembler allows you to write a single code for multiple architectures?

WASM? :D

FAsM

go's assembler enables this.

> What actually makes C a high-level language isn't the language, but the optimizer passes in modern C compilers.

I don't think so because that would imply that a language would be low-level until someone writes an optimizing compiler for it. The "levelness" of a language shouldn't depend on implementation details.

I was thinking it might be feasible to tackle Advent of Code in assembler if you started out with a good set of macros and a library for handling common data structures and memory operations.

I personally would not be able to do that and keep up with the daily problems, but it might be fun.

You can get pretty far just by linking libc :)

You'd probably be better off with TCC or with GCC with -O0. Assembly can only outrun C when the programmer uses context-aware optimizations. If you're just using generic macros everywhere to piece together a solution you may as well just use a high-level language.

Oh, I wasn't thinking of optimized code. It just sounds kind of fun. And it would still probably still beat anything that doesn't target machine code. But yeah, the compiler is going to produce better code than I can in most cases.

If it's for fun then sure, why not. What I meant was that you weren't really gaining any technical advantage by using Assembly like that.

I would love to see a side-by-side example of C and assembly to demonstrate what you're claiming here.

TI has an Assembly language for DSPs that looks like C written in SSA form.

Macro Assemblers like MASM, TASM, NASM, YASM et al, provide directives to define structs, strings and such, alongside macros for most common control structures.

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