In article , J. P. Gilliver (John)
wrote:

I remember - I _think_ it was in the last decade, but it might have
been
more - being startled when I spoke to a young computing graduate, to
find he'd never done any assembler. At that time, after my initial
double-take, I thought to myself: the field is big enough, that there'll
be plenty of room for him, and in practice he'll probably never have any
trouble finding interesting and well-paid employment.
there is no need for assembler anymore, except in very rare
circumstances.


On PCs maybe.

I bet some embedded stuff for ultra cheap mass market stuff is still
done in assember, or something only very slightly higher level.

Yes. Define "need". Compact code is noticeably more efficient - so runs
faster. Yes, for a lot of things, the returns don't justify the effort -
for a lot of things that are only done once, or where speed doesn't
matter, or - these days - to _some_ extent where modern processor power
can hide the inefficiency of the code.

compact code is not necessarily more efficient. a simple example is an
unrolled loop, which is less compact yet will run faster. another is
having a large lookup table versus calculating a value each time.

however, modern processors are far from simple, which is one reason why
a compiler can do a better job of optimization than humans can.

and then there's the issue of portability. anything written in a high
level language can be recompiled for another processor, normally with
little to no problem, whereas anything in assembler would need to be
entirely rewritten from scratch.

I suspect IrfanView, for example, is mostly coded in either assembler,
or at least quite low-level code (or just possibly using an excellent
optimiser - which are rare with ultra-high-level languages, such as
scripting interpreters).

it's highly unlikely any of it is in assembler.