Tooling Up: Conversational x86 ASM - Learning to appreciate your compiler

Most of the time we don't have to think so much about what goes on after we write our code. It's easy to forget that (once we get it to compile...) the instructions that the CPU sees are very different from the code we wrote. Most of that time that's an unimportant detail, but having some understanding of the process can help shape the way your code looks - and performs.

In this talk, Matt will give a "readers' guide" to assembly language, and take a peek at what goes on inside your compiler. We'll take a look at the amazing things it can (and can't) do for you. Matt will draw from his time in the 2000s-era games industry, more contemporary experience in low latency finance, and from the fun of writing and maintaining Compiler Explorer (a website that helps you visualise how your code is seen by a compiler).

You'll get a new appreciation for your compiler, and perhaps enough assembly knowledge to be dangerous!

The assembly we'll look at will be 64-bit Intel x86; and code snippets will mostly be simple C and C++, but the general form of assembly and kinds of optimisations compilers can cross language and CPU architectures.

Check out the slides here: https://github.com/mattgodbolt/yow-conversational-asm

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