I like my memes to come with a bibliography.
Everything is just silicon oxide gates being saturated and drained and turned on and off in various patterns very rapidly in a way that means something to us. That Fortran/C/C++/Assembly depends on that tiny two-MOSFET AND gate in the ALU to do the AND correctly every time.
Programming languages at the basic level are just an automated way of putting numbers into a calculator, processing them, and getting another number/status/flag back and doing something else with it based on the result.
When you download R, youre downloading C++/C and Fortran
Well I be damned. What does the Fortran do ?
Its just easy to write super-optimised code snippets in without having to break out into assembly.
What is the reason to avoid assembly? Is it prohibitively difficult?
Not only is it very difficult to write in assembly, the resulting code is not portable. Meaning that if you wrote it on x86 assembly it can’t run on ARM chips without emulation and that takes a significant hit on performance defeating the point
Yeah, it’s pretty difficult. Think of assembly as just one step above writing 1’s and 0’s, and you’re probably around how difficult it can be
I’ve delved into writing assembly only on the level of a student project. I really enjoyed it though. Obviously implementing a python math library would be far more complex but wouldn’t it be worth it for the possible performance gains?
I don’t think it would be anymore. Modern compilers are really really good at what they do, and often manually optimizing(writing assembly yourself) makes programs slower. So unless you are very good at assembly, I would just trust the compiler.
