Introduction

Tiobe regularly produces a list of the most popular programming languages and their recently published list has Assembly Language at number 8, moving up from number 16 last year. The top eight languages are:

The top spots are all well established and well used, C shows remarkable resilience and Java remains popular, in spite of Oracle. In the early days of the PC, all major applications and games were written in Assembly Language, but with the availability of high quality C compilers, this waned and application development switched to C and then other high level languages. Let’s look at why Assembly Language is having a bit of a renaissance.

Assembly Language is Accessible

In the early days, you needed to buy a macro assembler from the chip manufacturer or some other vendor, such as Microsoft’s MASM. Now, all the chip vendors add their Assembly Language support directly into the open source GNU Assembler and/or the LLVM Assembler. Both of these are excellent macro assemblers, run on any hardware, support cross compiling and best of all are completely free.

In my first job out of university, I did some Assembly Language programming on an Intel 80186 board and to debug it, I needed to use an in-circuit emulator (I2ICE) which was a big expensive piece of hardware that replaced the CPU with a debugging probe. Now, all the CPUs and boards have excellent debug probes and you can debug them using open source tools like GNU’s gdb.

Another big help are all the great books on Assembly Language that are available such as: “Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming”, “Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language” and “RP2040 Assembly Language Programming”.

Microcontrollers are Everywhere

The Arduino microcontroller has created a giant community of DIY electronics hobbyists. There is a huge proliferation of inexpensive microcontrollers. In the Arduino world, you program these in Arduino C, but often to get the performance you need, you need to drop down to Assembly Language. Similarly, the memory on these boards is limited, and Assembly Language is the only way to get use of every single bit available to you. With the newer microcontrollers like Raspberry’s RP2040 which are based on ARM 32-bit M-series CPUs, these are much more powerful and have more memory. However, with the extra power, people are attempting more ambitious projects, often involving machine learning applications or other compute intensive applications. Again, they hit the wall with C or MicroPython programming and have to delve into Assembly Language to solve their problems.

When people program these microcontrollers, they are connecting to all sorts of imaginative hardware devices, and they have to create their own libraries to interface to these and often the best way to do this is via Assembly Language.

Competition in the Phone App Market

The App markets for both iOS and Android have matured where as new versions come out, there are fewer changes. The competition between various Apps in a given category is intense and one key way for vendors to differentiate themselves from their competition is via improved performance. Beyond re-writing code to use more efficient algorithms, programmers are turning to hand-crafting the core routines of their Apps into Assembly Language.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) or AI is extremely compute intensive. There has been a proliferation of coprocessor boards for performing ML computations. All these coprocessors need to be programmed in their own native Assembly Language. Similarly, although you can program nVidia GPUs in CUDA C, to get the absolute most out of a board, you need to delve into the board’s native Assembly Language. Most of the ML libraries are built over top of older Linear Algebra mathematical libraries written in Fortran. As people take on harder and harder problems and need to get useful work done out of every CPU cycle, many routines are being re-written in Assembly Language.

Summary

Modern applications are usually written with a number of modules, each module written in the best programming language for the module’s function. Perhaps C for a back end process, JavaScript for a web page and then Assembly Language for important performance critical routines. I don’t think anyone is taking on large applications in 100% Assembly Language, but enough Assembly Language is making its way into applications to move it up the Tiobe index.

Assembly Language is a great way to learn about how computers work and you might want to take a look at one of my books on the subject.