Exist university that teaches that is necessary coding in Assembly?

[Warner Losh]

On Oct 21, 2014, at 10:57 AM, françai s <romapera15 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is true that very few people write directly in Assembly?

Yes. People do it only when necessary. And the cases where it is necessary
have dwindled as the compiler technology has improved over the years.
Now people usually just need to do it to access special bits of the machine
that aren’t accessible via normal C. And even then, the trend has been to
create inline functions callable from C that produce the right generated code
with the users of those functions having to know or care they are in assembler.

There are also some rare occasions where people write directly in hex
because the op-codes aren’t in the assembler that they are using and they
need that functionality. Rare, but it does happen sometimes in the deep,
machine-speicifc bowls of the kernel.

> Exist university that teaches that is necessary coding in Assembly?

It has been a few years since I was in school, but when I went to school,
people at the time said that assembler coding was rarely needed. That said,
we had a crash course in assembler so that we could write an assembler for
the VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD as part of our course in C to teach us how
the computer worked.

Over the years I’ve picked up other assemblers by reading the relevant architectural
definition manuals, gas (and other) assembler documentation and through much trial
and especially error.

Warner


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