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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

This article is less about assembly programming and more a tour de force on retro game development for the Atari ST. The author talks about using inline assembler to optimize gfx and game rendering inner loops. Oh and the author ported Doom to the Atari ST.

Some people are drawn to assembly and that’s great. Me personally, after a course in undergrad studying MIPS assembly, I learned to appreciate what all the compiler does for us and moved on!

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RISC processors, especially MIPS were not designed for hand written Assembly code.

While I have manually written code for Z80, 68000, x86, and MIPS, I never bothered with MIPS outside university project assignments.

I've always had a deep interest for it, but the more I learn about what and how compilers can do stuff, the more I'm like "Ok, better just let the compiler handle it".

It's truly wild how much a modern compiler can transform code. There are circumstances where a human can do better (mostly around SIMD optimizations) but those require you to be in situations where you doing operations on large arrays of numbers. Not extremely common in most programming (beyond maybe making totals. Which is a SIMD operation that compilers do well).

Thanks for the summary. I was lucky enough to follow VoxelST and STDOOM on Twitter, yet skipped this thread on Hacker News because imho the title doesn't sell it well. Thankfully a friend and fellow ST nerd sent it to me. Can recommend revisiting the old social posts to read about this as it happened.

For me MIPS is the best ISA for “stream of consciousness” assembly, you can just write it then tidy up the register usage and pipelining after.

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