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This reminded me of the time a colleague thought he could rewrite his C code in assembly to get more performance, what he learnt at the end was that the C compiler optimisation was much better than his assembly coding skills.

This makes the fact that Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in Assembly even more mind blowing.

For his next trick, he writes it in transistors and binary

Admittedly, it's been some time since I last considered programming in C a "breath of fresh air" over something else 😂

I’m 59 and wrote my first program in an assembly type language in 1977. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants. I am an aerospace engineer, but still need to write code to automate engineering tasks. Visual Studio is my environment of choice because it makes my job so simple.

What makes compiler optimization so great is its not just a single bit of contributed ideas from a single person whose smart in the field of assembly, but its a collection of all the smartest techniques anyone could functionally think of to optimize your code, as a result the compiler is the culmination of every idea of almost every geniuses' demonstrably proven optimization technique, its basically the collective execution of every single engineering wizard in a singular binary who also knows exactly how to evaluate your code most efficiently almost all the time. (granted we assume all compilers do the same optimizations to low level machine code, which outside of edge cases and small processing differences that's pretty much true)

I was thinking about learning assembly, thank you for changing my mind

good video, short and straight to the point. Nice!

I’m taking an assembly class right now. Really makes you appreciate c++

i just took a look at your code and for some reason the assembly one looks way cleaner and simlper than the c++ one, at least for me. congrats on the readability of the asm version

As a programmer myself, I'm really impressed at your level of knowledge. Very entertaining too. Keep making videos :D

The advantage of assembly code is that you only write the code that is needed and the assembler turns mnemonics into machine executable instructions. Higher languages rely on libraries which are general purpose, parameterised routines that include a lot more code. Then libraries are written that rely on the inclusion of other libraries... Yes, it makes the coding easier (read "achievable"), but less efficient. Hence we need super-powerful 64 bit cpus and super fast memory just to present a desk top. I taught myself z80 and 6502 code in the '80s and progressed through a career in COBOL and similar 3rd gen languages in the '90s and '00s. I haven't written code in decades. But the fact remains that the nearer you get to the metal the more "immediate" the execution becomes. However, trade that off against the difficulties of coding at that low level (the Roller Coaster Tycoon that others have discussed). But you can write crappy inefficient code in any language, so speed of execution isn't just a property of the language. The driver behind current languages is speed to market, not speed of execution.

cool video, its make me want to learn again about low level and assembly deeper

>Using a linked list to write a breakout clone What is it with you modern, high level 'programmers' that feel the need to shoehorn random memory structures into your programs? You can write breakout with just statically defined, bss memory - you can even use bits in a calculated grid system for the blocks to maximize cache utilization in the collision detection and make massive games that still run fine. This is the thing about assembly that many people don't seem to understand: you control exactly how complex it is; you control exactly how much useless abstraction you add to your system. It just so happens that simple solutions to simple problems are also usually much faster than complex solutions.

I found this video extremely useful Nathan, thank you. I had to put a SDL_Delay(1) statement in the running loop as it was impossibly fast to play, and cpu usage was very high - unless I did something wrong? I also had a compiler warning in c_window_destroy line 79. “Potentially uninitialised variable” - fair enough! I commented this line out for expediency. The hardest part of this was installing the SDL lib. I was stupidly trying to build a Win32 using the 64 bit SDL lib - silly me!

Interesting upload, thanks for this. Assembly language, while extremely simple in it's individual instruction code mnemonics, is incredibly extremely difficult to expertly program in. As you'll know, there's a lot of 70's-90's 'expert-level' assembly language programmers out there. Yes, of course, such expertise will be linked to specific CPU's and their instruction sets. It's also important for every programmer to know that every program in every language out there executes, ultimately, as machine code. You either write your machine code in assembly language (a 1:1 translation using opcode mnemonics and any associated operands), or, you write in a higher level language and put 100% of your trust in your 'translation process' e.g. compiler. Today, assembly language is never used for large projects (for obvious reasons), but when it is used (e.g. game loop optimisation) - and by an expert of on the target CPU - then the best a compiler can do here is to equal the hand-written version... --> Now, with that...if you compile the SAME C++ program with different compilers, you will get very significantly different machine code outputs with each compiler. Today's programmers badly need to think deeply as to why this is, and, what effects it can have on your program (hint: speed, size, bugs)... What this means if that there is very significant room for equally significant optimisation using assembly language.

Instead of forcing the use of linked lists in assembly, I'd go for different approaches, sometimes as simple as resw.

Many thanks aks for sharing your AMAZING project 👏👏👏🔥✌ Please consider making end-to-end tutorials for the whole project. 🙏 That will be extremely helpful for c cpp assemly learners. Maybe more similar projects in the future Many thanks in advance! 👍

One thing you did in your code that I've never thought about doing is writing out the function logic as a comment block under each prototype on the header file. I could see how useful that would be for other devs who don't want to drive into the specifics of every function, only what they do and return in an abstracted way.

Bro I was just making breakout in JavaScript lol

I’m a bit lost as to why you would need linked lists for breakout. Breakout is a game that could be handled pretty easily using only the data segment to define your static array of bricks and player tokens. Biggest pain I foresee is the gameloop, graphics, and IO but none of that should require dynamic memory.

Thanks for the video, waiting for more like this video with othe programming languages

I thought I knew how to code a little at least, and then I watched this video lol! You’re a genius

You still code assembly faster than I do in python

Trying to wrap my head around how confused you would have to be to implement a linked list in assembly, or why you'd implement an allocator for a small dataset with a static maximum length.

Can’t be disagreed, when I first learnt assembly I fall in love with it, but as I go I was trying to build more complex stuff like floating point arithmetic, and visual stuff it just sucked , because I have to implement everything from the scratch. Any event it’s amazing work you have done , thanks for sharing.❤❤

That is very useful and impressive. Thank you.

All this is way over my head, I used C in the past but that was in the eighties running on SCO Xenix. But I do remember the code for this same game written in the Basic that came with the first gen Apple 2, I doubt if it was much longer than 30 lines due to the graphics and paddle capabilities that Woz built in when he wrote the language. It ran seamlessly on a 1Mhz CPU with the 32k Ram I started out with.

Well if you code in assembly with a c++ mindset no surprise you'll find c++ more comfortable. Same happens if you come from python to c++. Not to care about pointers and memory allocations is a "breath of fresh air" in python after c++. However if you do care about efficiency you'll find python frustrating, since you can't controll what the computer is actually doing. So if you learn the c++ mindset you'll find python extremely limiting. The same applies to assembly: if you wanna squize the last bit of performance out of the computer you'll find c or c++ limiting after assembly. Of course it doesn't really apply to moder PCs but could be a real issue with programing microcontrollers, 8 bit retro computers or other devices with limited resources.

Come on, you can use any C/C++ libraries with assembly too. Maybe it's not very easy, but coding in assembly doesn't have to mean coding every single part of the code in assembly. For me the most effective way to code something like a game is mix various languages. Where you need high complexity - high level languages, high performance - C++, C, assembly. I found C# is like perfect for some complex (or dynamic) data structures, high-level protocols handling, but it's not good to just push bits from one place to another with consistent timing. C is perfect for pushing bits reliably, but handling complex things with it gets tedious. C++ is something in between. The speed of C, but it's a little easier to add some more complexity without writing too much. BTW, C flavored C++ is a cool thing. You just use C++ like C with namespaces ;) That approach works surprisingly well in some scenarios.

OUTSTANDING video. Thanks so much.

Wasn't disappointed with this video, great work. I got a class this semester that specialises in the architecture of computing units. It's mainly aimed towards optimisation. Going from single thread unoptimised code to heavily multithreaded, optimised in all aspects, vectorisation, working with cache more effectively, reading less and what we need. Understanding how CPUs manage to do more per clock and how you can help it as a programmer with properly designed code. That's just something awesome. But yeah, you're not gonna expand your for loop, let it read 4 different values behind each other, because it takes three clock ticks to actually get it and work with it, so your code would do nothing. That's just a small part the work compilers do for us and I personally think that is awesome. They are written by smarter, more experienced programmers and are in development for longer than I am alive. No point in drag racing them. I got to say, had one class about assembly and I don't even know where I would start if I were to try to implement something in it, not to mention with GUI. Great video showing that going deeper doesn't always mean faster. Can't wait for the next one titled "I tried to write something in binary by hitting neutrinos with my HDD (just kidding, used Emacs plugin)"

A really useful challenge for me was taking something as simple as a linked list and go from Python to C++ to C and assembly. On the way i dropped a view things like C++ had a dynamic type and a static typed version. C and assembly only had static types. And i always used the the knowledge as well as the generated code from previous versions. This challenge really lets you think about what you are actually doing with high level features.

You are such a legend, well done.

Despite not writing in it since college when i used these little embedded project boards, i think my experience with assembly is invaluable. It allowed me to better understand how things work under the hood when programming in higher level languages, like C and C++. I would love to program in assembly, but it is way too tedious to do so for the code i write. We should be thankful to the creators of higher level languages who abstracted away the tedium of assembly and made programming much less tedious. Great video, btw!

Wow this is awesome! Somehow you're so much underrated, anyway, I subbed.

man im so glad you getting recognition, keep it up

100th like keep it up bro awsome content

Great video, this is the kind of stuff I work with daily. How come you keep implementing linked lists? Would a normal array not work fine here? Linked lists are often more trouble than they are worth because of the memory overhead in each element and it is comparatively much more computationally expensive than a typical array.

1:09 about malloc you can use C library functions in assembly program perfectly well you just need to take care of the ABI

First of all probs for this cool interesting video. Secondly I need that theme xd

Always remember the costs associated with the coding and maintenance of the code. But that is part of losing knowledge, people are forgetting the basics learned from the 1960s through 2000. Great video again!

you guys wanna REALLY have your minds blown? nearly all 8-bit and 16-bit games were designed in assembly let THAT sink in

i like the way he is so on point.

I would love to see an in depth video on the x86 version

In assembly you have access to all the standard Microsoft libraries and with a decent Macro Assembler like FASM, you have macros to handle those function calls. Moreover something like tail call optimization is usually just a jmp call in assembly, while impossible in C, unless the compiler provides it. Some of those macros are pretty powerful and you can actually be productive in assembly. The main problem is that it's not portable.

i wrote a thing like this way back in Turbo Pascal, fun fact the pascal compiler was written in assembler, still amazes me to this day!

Love the brevity of your video while also keeping it easy to digest! Keep it up! Also really like the theme that you're using, seems easy on the eyes. Mind if I ask what it is called?

Reminds me of the guy who programmed an entire roller coasters game in assembly.

hey man, first, congrats on making something that complex in assembly without years of experience in it! I feel like you took a very wrong approach to coding in it and C though. The first realization should have been that you don't need a linked list, or a malloc, you need only do the steps required to run the game, just mapping a few memory pages and getting a pointer to the window vram from the kernel is all you should really need (as well as communication messages between the os and you but you had to do that regardless). Ofcourse working without the niceities is tough if you've never done it before so it seems like the only thing to do in x86 assembly is to look at it and start your IDE with a normal language on it, but there are still very good uses for assembly programming, though not directly in assembly. What is done (most commonly in the games industry because that's one of the last places where getting everything out of your computer matters) is you take a very unoptimized problem, you shrink it down through regular optimization, and then you apply SIMD to it. What's that? Yeah there are special assembly instructions a C compiler will never use, unless you tell it to, and even then unless you structure your data right, it won't get to use them. These instructions can process whole arrays of numbers or even matricies of numbers at once, there are instructions for ray intersections, for regex filtering text 16 letters at a time, cryptographic functions, all these can be done by specialized wiring inside the cpu extremely more efficiently then any high level code could. And that's mostly the only place assembly should be used, because as you've discovered, it's a pain. Thanks for sharing it with us!

You can use libraries and call functions in ASM. If I'd been writing in ASM, I'd have used SDL and libc. Just because you're writing in one language doesn't mean you can't call functions written in a different language.

Damn I thought you had like 200k subs or even more judging by the qualities of your videos. You have earned your self a new sub Ps could you make tutorials for c++ :(

In the '80's it was easy to write apps in Assembly that were faster than C. Since then the microcode in microprocessors got far more sophisticated. The longer pipelines & similar sophistication are things that compiler writers spent a lot of time optimising their output to take advantage of. But you have to think of all that with you are also dealing with the logic of your code. Thats tough.

This seems to be out of the scope of the video but I'd be curious to see some sort of performance benchmarks in terms of FPS comparison between all of them! Would be cool to see how little or much the pain of low-level programming is for speed.

You didn't need a linked list (an array is plenty for your game) and you didn't need to implement x11 directly. C doesn't provide graphics libraries any more than assembler does so if you allow yourself to link libs in c then you can allow yourself to link them in assembler.

Okay, I have to ask, why did you have use malloc in ASM? It sounds like you litterly reinvented the wheel, because of your familiarity with how you are used to doing things. Having coded in all 3 languages myself here is what I can say. Don't expect any hand holding in ASM, if you're doing things the same way you did it in a compiled language you're probably doing it wrong. Examples are, coding while using a compile anywhere mentality. ASM by definition is machine specific. Your targeting specific hardware, using a specific OS. Once you realize this you will find in every OS a specialized memory management API. You then have to think how that API is meant to be used. Then make it do what you want. At my peak I got to 50/50 when comparing my code to compilers. Half the time I could beat them in both size and execution speed. It only got better if I peaked at their output and used that to optimize mine. You probably have no idea how often compilers tend to add a ton of unessarry stack management. If your good you can manage your entire stack with math and free up your stack frame register to be used as a generic register. C is the baseline I compare all languages against. Its simple no nonesese calls and structure generally makes this one of the simpler languages to work with. C++ is what I use when I need lots of easy to implement data structures. Of the 3 languages this is the one where data management takes the foreground. This might be a bit overkill for a breakout game. As most of your data structures are ideally just arrays. So if I were to equate the languages as tools to move boxes. ASM is using tweasers, C is just picking them up manually, and C++ is the forklift. And don't get me started on what you can do when you realize you can export libraries in c and c++ to be used with ASM, and you can use inline ASM in both C and C++. These languages are litterly interchangeable.

i might be the old one here but i remember writing a breakout game in ASM and i had no issues with memory to get more banks or issues with the data as i could get away using the video memory instead of an array of blocks. and a counter to know if we ran out of blocks. and it was running just fine - sure there was no windows / gnome (x) to worry about as it was dos based, but if anything it was TOO fast, so had to slow down the bounce to whatever millisec to be playable. (of course C compilers are making much more effecient compiles, but it does not make a difference at such a low complexity game and where you have to slow it down anyway) and we are talking about 8MHZ cpu speed and not 4.2GHZ with 16 cores :) i agree writing the code is easier on higher level languages, but i reject that there is no fun and excitement working in ASM. at least for me it was fun

The asm version appears to run slower than C/C++ versions. That says alot about compiler optimization. I would try turning off optimization, compiling and running to see if that makes a difference

insightful experience. You should try to that similarly using Rust, it's not very different from C++ (you might need to "let go" some C/C++ concepts) but it's interesting language (kinda boring also, but the safety is worth it).

You don't need linked lists. You have a memory buffer containing the bricks, you need one bit to activate or disable a brick

very cool!

Love the bit about "the assembly can only be as good as i can write it" A lot of people seem to think that writing in asm is racing stripes to make the computer go faster. Humans should do the things humans are good at and leave the things computers are good at to computers.

Why would you need a malloc and a linked list for a simple breakout ? You only need a fixed amount of memory to store the level and the graphics. Just use data and bss sections. Anyway I never coded in assembly on Windows but I'm pretty sure there are Windows functions to allocate memory dynamically.

And then there's Tom who worte Rollercoaster Tycoon entirely in ASM. Wild.

"In this video, we try to create linked lists directly in x86 to learn how painful that is"

I've been curious about the best way to implement graphics in assembly, and this video gave some great insight on the topic. Unfortunately, it also discouraged me from ever wanting to make anything in assembly. 😅

I'm curious why you implemented malloc for the x86 version? I've done some simple games targeting wasm without libc and had no issue just putting everything into a statically allocated buffer

1:27 couldnt u link the .a files for these functions & use those as library?

No idea why you'd need a linked list to implement Breakout.

So good to watch it, I wanted to really learn asm, but it's so hard, I do c and c++ for my university's sake but work with python. How much time did you need to master asm? And what do you think should I learn it for cyber security?

Wow, did not know about std::optional, that's awesome!

Yeah I was learning zig for highest performance generated assembly, but I've been drifting back to typescript for the comfort and ergonomics. Programming in assembly sounds like major lock-in to your hardware. I should really just be coding in c++ but I've got a huge contrairian streak.

There is a mindset for each programming language. Similar to how a spoken language has depth of expression with more experience.

Awesome

Pretty cool nice job

Very interesting. Surely the next step is to code the game in C# (or Java) to exploit the next level of abstraction in terms of memory management?

In NASM you can use “wrt ..plt” to call C functions. I think C/C++ is nicer though, you can use Intel intrinsics for SSE/AVX too.

Didn't know about type safety before this vid

If you approached the asm with an old school mindset you would have simply skipped the malloc and linked list for a project this simple. Neither would be necessary. In simple systems we used and reused static buffers defined in the assembly directly, and linked lists if used at all were usually using embedded pointers in the statically allocated objects. Though right enough larger systems typically ended up writing much of the same code a C runtime includes. FWIW once the C compilers evolved enough to generated decent code, everyone, barring a few stick in the muds, switched to using C with asm used only to enhance performance where it was most needed.

There is a reason why C is still VERY popular and still the language of choice for creating Operating Systems and other low-level code (though Rust has become a viable alternative). That is what it was designed to do. But the creators of C never intended it to be the universal language. In fact, they didn't believe in a "universal programming language". They created a host of other languages for specific purposes, some narrow and some wide.

While C/C++ compiler optimizations are usually faster than normal assembly code, note that optimized assembly code will be faster than C/C++ compiler optimizations.

It surprises me that you find namespaces an improvement. I would think that the program you are writing is small enough that you wouldn't get many, or even any, naming collisions.

I'd be interested in a memory footprint and runtime comparisons of the 3.

and now imagine creating an entire bloody theme park gamne that runs with thousaands of park visitors lategame in assembly :)

in modern assembly u can define structs an access them very similar to what u do in C. Isnt malloc just a system call to sbrk ?

Assembly is my main programming language as a ROM hacker and reverse engineer.

Why would you need malloc to code a version of Breakout in assembler? Surely everything would just be statically allocated and you don't need anything more than simple arrays to represent the set of bricks on the screen (e.g. 1 byte per brick with each brick within a grid: 14 column x 8 rows). An early assembly programmer wouldn't even do that, they'd allocate 1 bit per brick. Then you'd first check the location of the ball: ball_y>=brickmap_y; && ball_y

Great video, and found plenty amazing comment, a lot of amazing people in comment section

why were you using a linked list for the firs two then a vector (dynamic array) for the last one?

“Stops @ 4:20” subbed

30 years ago I was writing games in x86 assembly. I was 18 at the time and it was exciting to have a level of performance that I'd never been able to achieve with stock libraries that came with my BASIC and C compilers. But... yeah, that's a lot of extra work. I very quickly switched to writing my own graphics libraries in assembly and writing everything else in C. Kids today have it too easy. I could rewrite that entire project in C# in a weekend.

I have a habit of coding Tic Tac Toe after I finished learning a new language, now onto making my 3rd one!

Petition to release a full detailed video like a tutorial

How did you represent the bricks in the memory ? How did you draw the bricks ?

Regarding assembly, malloc, printing, etc. are implemented by the operating system as syscalls which are a special interrupt, 0x80 on linux. Also, you can easily use any C libraries by declaring externals and linking your object files with libraries you wish to use. It's funny you said you needed malloc to have linked lists since malloc is usually implemented as a linked list in memory. Did the assembly version try to write to the drive instead of the RAM? If you didn't want to use any external code, could've simply reserved a decent block of memory for your malloc implementation

Thought it was gonna be one of those nonsense "writing the same game, using the same source code-ish to see the difference between C and C++" but the fact that you actually leveraged what C++ does so great (like RAII), anonymous namespaces, etc, makes it rather refreshing.

It reminds us why the original Elite was mind glowingly incredible.

Did you use some custom font, or how did you get it to display the arrows and the "not equal" as one symbol? (in the VSCode)

For such a simple project i'm not sure why you'd need dynamic allocation nor linked lists. Given that all levels are statically allocated on a fixed size grid.