[chrisseaton]

I know it's abstracted away, but it's still relevant to how the programs run because almost all programs go through an assembly language phase.

[saagarjha]

What languages don’t? All of them execute on the processor in some way.

[chrisseaton]

You can generate machine language without an assembly language intermediate phase, if you just directly put bytes into a file. But most compilers have some kind of assembler in them.

[cryptoz]

I could be mistaken, but, don't JVM languages avoid assembly steps? They use bytecode and are translated directly to machine code; I'm not sure there is an translate-to-assembly step. I'm also not sure how much of this confusion is semantics vs actually different components of the compilation and running process.

[chrisseaton]

They still have assemblers in them - they're just done with method calls rather than text.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/e73ce9b406c34bd460f0797f...

Also if you look at the compiler's intermediate representation at the very last phases you'll see it basically looks like an assembly program.

[saagarjha]

Pure interpreters like CPython?

[chrisseaton]

The interpreters themselves go through assembly language. Assembly is relevant because the whole stack is still actively built on it.