Is knowledge of the Assembly language still applicable in the workplace?

Question

Hello, I'm an aspiring programmer and I'm super passionate about computers (as I'm sure we all are.) And I was wondering if their are any low-end developers who applied their knowledge of the Assembly language at their workplace. Along with that, is their a demand for developers who know Assembly or are they becoming extinct due to decompilers. Are Assembly programmers obsolete? And last but not least... Should I take the time to learn Assembly?

Answer 1

I think it is not as applicable today as it was 20 or 30 years ago, unless you work in a niche area of embedded systems.

Answer 2

If someone claimed to be an expert low-level C programmer, but had no understanding of registers, the stack pointer, push and pop, calling conventions etc. or could not read assembly I would not have a very good opinion of him.

While you're not going to be writing much assembly today, unless you're writing a bootloader, or working with embedded systems, you still need to understand it in order to read compiler output and understand why:

char *foo()
{ char g[] = "AAA" ; return g;}

or similar is an error.

Answer 3

Assembly becomes very important when building a system that may rely on other systems built in another language. In addition, there are possible times when you need to integrate assembly code directly into your system whether it’s for efficiency or you need to ensure something happens a certain way because of the hardware that the system will be implemented on.

There are many other reasons why assembly is still important, but these are just a few.

I agree with Vlad about being able to read assembly code and being able to understand what’s going on.