Re:How to Read Assembly Language
by ChrisMarshallNY on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @08:41AM
(#26315186)
I consider Godbolt to be an educational and “thinking cap” tool, as opposed to a critical path optimization tool.
It is pretty damn cool, though.
It’s sort of like how an algebraic graphing app is most useful for students, as opposed to working engineers.
Nowadays, with on-chip threading, ASM stack dumps are a lot less useful than they used to be. Really, for me, munged function names are what I use to figure out the general vicinity of a bug, which I then figure out, by examining the source.
It really does help a lot to understand what the compiler will actually turn your high level code into, because quite often the results are very surprising (or if only to be shocked about the amount of assembly code that's generated from a few lines of C++ template code). Comparing the differences in output between different compilers and optimization levels is also very useful.