Why should I learn assembly language in 2020? (complete waste of time?)

Relevance of Learning Assembly Language in 2020
📌 Learning assembly language provides insight into how computers work under the hood, leading to better decision-making as a software developer and understanding performance differences.
⚙️ Assembly is human-readable machine language and serves as the intermediate step compilers (like C compilers) use before converting code to binary machine instructions.
💡 The first assembly language was created by Kathleen Booth in 1947, who also researched early neural networks.

Practical Applications and Learning Methods
💻 Developers can compile C code to assembly (using the `-s` flag) to analyze mysterious program behavior or understand code without source access.
🛠️ Embedded system developers often need assembly knowledge to debug compiler quirks or undocumented behavior when dealing with new processors.
🚀 While rare, handcrafted assembly might be necessary for sections of code requiring blazing speed where every cycle counts.

Recommended Scope of Assembly Knowledge
📚 While mastery isn't required for most careers, it is recommended to reach a level where one can write simple assembly programs involving basic arithmetic, I/O, system calls, and function calls.
🧠 Understanding assembly demystifies concepts like the call stack, which fundamentally changes how one views C function calls.
📚 Focus should be on understanding instruction types: arithmetic, bitwise, memory access (loads/stores), and control flow (branches/jumps).

Assembly Language Specificity and Focus
🧠 The specific assembly language learned is processor-dependent, as each processor has a unique instruction set.
🎯 The goal for most developers should be to understand how assembly languages function and translate high-level code, rather than mastering a particular assembly flavor.
⚠️ When learning by compiling C code to assembly, turn off compiler optimizations to avoid confusion caused by the optimizer restructuring the code for speed.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ The primary justification for learning assembly is to gain a deeper understanding of computer architecture, leading to better software development decisions.
➡️ Recommended basic competency includes understanding assembly for basic arithmetic, I/O, system calls, and function calls.
➡️ To effectively learn translation, use your C compiler to generate assembly files and study the resulting instructions, ensuring optimizations are disabled.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Mar 05, 2026, 07:33 UTC