Assembly Spicy Spreadsheets

Assembly Language Is Just Spicy Spreadsheet Formulas

When I was debugging a performance issue at ExxonMobil, I had to drop down to assembly to figure out why our network packet processing was taking forever. Looking at x86 assembly after years of high-level programming is like looking at the Matrix code - at first it’s just noise, then suddenly you see the blonde, brunette, redhead.

The thing that blows people’s minds is that assembly isn’t actually that complicated - it’s just extremely tedious. You’ve got maybe 30 instructions that matter, and everything else is just moving data around like you’re playing Tetris with bytes. MOV this here, ADD these together, JMP if something’s true. It’s like cooking if you could only touch one ingredient at a time and had to put everything back in the fridge between each step.

What really got me was realizing how much modern CPUs lie to us about what they’re doing. That innocent looking ADD instruction? The CPU is actually doing speculative execution, branch prediction, and out-of-order processing, turning your simple addition into this baroque pipeline of parallel universes where multiple possible futures are computed simultaneously. Your assembly code is just a suggestion to the CPU, like giving directions to a taxi driver who knows shortcuts you’ve never heard of.