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Question: How did you go about learning x86 asm? Do you consider yourself expert, or enough to get by?
Asked by Will (24.234.128.x) on September 11 2010, 7:32pm
Reply on September 12 2010, 5:05am:
    I started with writing little bits and pieces of code with inline assembly and went from there.

    I think I got pretty good at writing stuff in asm, though maintaining it was another story, and I knew the timings for the 486 (and pairings for the Pentium and to some extent limitations of the P6) pretty well, and while it's meaningless now I think I retain a lot of that knowledge. Oh and I wrote a fair bit of MMX and 3DNow code, too, but not much SSE*. So, expert for 1999?

    I think once you get the concepts behind assembly, though, it can always be applied -- and to new architectures... For example, EEL2 has a bunch of asm stubs, which I've ported to x86_64 (pretty simple I guess) and PPC (involved reading a bunch of docs, looking at what gcc produces, etc). And then you need to know the ABIs too (sometimes targeting a new platform involves changing calling convention, etc, but not instruction set, anyway I digressed).
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