A little late from me, but welcome to assembler Brazer.
Assembly is attractive, I'm not really sure why didn't I learn it before but there was and still is a lot of people telling that assembly isn't a thing because you can't defeat compiler and similar excuses.
I guess I was affected by such statements so I never took a look at asm myself but I do realize now there are 2 conflicting world views between assembly coders and HLL coders, at least when it comes to pushing
personal opinions upon others.
So in the end I guess I'll be using assembly in combination with HLL to optimize portions of code and to boost skills overall but nothing serious or big.
The one major reason for me to use assembler in it's power to do almost anything you could expect a computer could do. If you ever get into such an argument, challenge the other person to write a small program to extract the square root of 123456789.987654321 (or anything similar) with the accuracy of 9,999 decimal digits and display the answer on the screen!
If you should doubt such feasibility but you may be curious, I suggest you go to ray.masmcode.com, then to the "Binary Coded Decimals" section at the bottom of the page. There, download the BCDtut where you will find a folder named WINSQR containing a small program which you can use to perform the above challenge.
(BTW, I had written such a program some 40+ years ago on a TRS-80 having a total memory of 64kb. Such is the power of assembly.)
On a separate subject, if you ever delve into writing a program requiring extensive use of floating point maths, significant improvement in the speed of execution can be obtained with assembly. Compared to the use of HLLs, the gains are generally obtained by a possible significant reduction of memory access; with 8 FPU registers, a lot of intermediate results can be retained directly inside the FPU instead of being transfered back and forth between the FPU and memory. While on the above site, you can also have a peek at the "Complex Numbers" section and download the WMANJUL folder. It contains a program generating the Mandelbrot fractal which makes a VERY intensive use of the FPU.
(My pet peeve against Microsoft is the fact that many very useful programs have been produced in the past and provided with a help file .HLP based on Microsoft's design. The support for the use of such files has been dropped entirely as of WINDOWS10. The help file in the above downloaded folder will thus be entirely useless; however, a pop-up help will appear with the F1 key at any time to indicate which key will perform which operation. Enjoy. Full screen is more enjoyable.)
