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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon (larstofus.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/tycoon@lemmy.world
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Crossposted from https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1003114

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[–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Is assembly code really comparable to vacuum tubes? Maybe it's because I work with video, but usage of assembly is still a thing in performance critical Codec code.

P.S. I think machine code is a step below assembly. I could be wrong though.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Assembly is the 'human-readable' version. It has mnemonic values for the opcodes, so you can write eg. RET to return from a subroutine rather than the machine code 0xC3 / 195. It also lets you write named labels for offsets in the code which are substituted for their number values during assembly, which saves a lot of tedious counting, and macros, which are expanded into a longer list of instructions, saving lots of copy-paste.

    So yeah, machine code is a step down. Not a big step down, there's pretty much a 1:1 conversion between either form, but assembly has a couple of niceties that make it much easier for humans to work with.

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