[squeaky-clean]

How about security? I would never want an app written entirely in assembly to be allowed to take in arbitrary user input from the public internet.

Cross-platform support, which you might argue just falls under convenience, but if you're writing for a different CPU architecture, you've basically written 2 separate programs now and not one.

[rep_lodsb]

>How about security? I would never want an app written entirely in assembly to be allowed to take in arbitrary user input from the public internet.

As opposed to one written in C, or a scripting language?

When you are coding every arithmetic operation by hand, it is trivial to detect e.g. integer overflows. And even produce the mathematically correct result for operations that temporarily overflow a 32/64 bit register.

(The exception is RISC-V, which seems designed exclusively as a target for C compilers and makes these operations more costly, thus guaranteeing that they won't be used even by compilers for safer languages)

Assemblers also won't remove any instruction you write because of reasoning about "undefined behavior". They won't change constant-time code into something that isn't.

There is a "soft limit" on the complexity of hand-written code, which encourages thinking more carefully about the design, and using data representations that are a good fit to both the problem and the machine.

Yes, all of that is more work, and requires specialized knowledge. But what I don't understand is why most programmers today think that is a bad thing?

[johnnyworker]

> Yes, all of that is more work, and requires specialized knowledge. But what I don't understand is why most programmers today think that is a bad thing?

Gotta love how when someone makes an wrapper around one feature of ffmpeg weighing over 100 MB, some say that's making great tools more accessible, and is saving the original dev so much time (and the gazillion people who will maintain it forever, because that's not the vanishingly small exception but the norm, The Thing That Must Be Planned For).

But when someone says the think making really tiny and bloat-free things by hand, and with 10x times the effort, the sky is falling, and people put more energy into denouncing what a human can achieve, vs. what modern compilers can do, than it would take to code the thing in brainfuck.

I think it's the corporate focus. Some people think doing something for money, and to multiply money, is intrinsically more "serious" than doing it for the love of it, or just for fun, and with no more of a goal in mind than skipping stones. And I think trauma plays a role, too: Someone mentions making a vanilla whatever (and it doesn't get more vanilla than assembly... it's the opposite of using a framework to be able to make 5 apps in 3 days), and people instantly come swarming to talk about the nightmare of inheriting that "code base".

[squeaky-clean]

> But what I don't understand is why most programmers today think that is a bad thing?

I think it's a bad thing because I disagree with you that you'll write fewer bugs because you're coding everything by hand. In my experience how much manual work you need to do correlates 100% with how many bugs the software will have.