• TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn’t writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don’t get that panel.

    • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.

      Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover “standard” PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don’t know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant “most machines” as in “most machines that could run windows”. Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since “most machines” to me would refer to platform concerns.