Assembly language and compiled languages

Question

How is assembly faster than compiled languages if both are translated to machine code?

I'm talking about truly compiled languages which are translated to machine code. Not C# or Java which are compiled to an intermediate language first and then compiled to native code by a software interpreter, etc.

On Wikipedia, I found something which I'm not sure if it's in any way related to this. Is it because that translation from a higher level language generates extra machine code? Or is my understanding wrong?

A utility program called an assembler is used to translate assembly language statements into the target computer's machine code. The assembler performs a more or less isomorphic translation (a one-to-one mapping) from mnemonic statements into machine instructions and data. This is in contrast with high-level languages, in which a single statement generally results in many machine instructions.

Answer 1

Well, it relates a bit to your question, indeed. The point is that compilers produce inefficient machine code at times for various reasons, such as not being able to completely analyze your code, inserting automatic range checks, automatic checks for objects being null, etc.

On the other hand if you write assembler code by hand and know what you're doing, then you can probably write some things much more efficient than the compiler, although the compiler's behavior may be tweaked and you can usually tell it not to do range checking, for example.

Most people, however, will not write better assembler code than a compiler, simply because compilers are written by people who know a good deal of really weird but really cool optimizations. Also things like loop unrolling are usually a pain to write yourself and make the resulting code faster in many cases.

While it's generally true that everything that a computer executes is machine code, the code that runs differs greatly depending on how many abstraction levels you put between the machine and the programmer. For Assembler that's one level, for Java there are a few more ...

Also many people mistakenly believe that certain optimizations at a higher abstraction layer pay off at a lower one. This is not necessarily the case and the compiler may just have trouble understanding what you are trying to do and fail to properly optimize it.

Answer 2

Assembly may sometimes be faster than a compiled language if an assembly programmer writes better assembly than that generated by the compiler.

A compiled language is often faster than assembly because programmers who write compilers usually know the CPU architecture better than programmers who are utilizing assembly in a one-off, limited-case, situation.

Answer 3

An assembly expert may be able to write assembly code that is more effective (fewer instructions, more efficient instructions, SIMD, ...) than what a compiler generates automatically.

However, most of the time, you're better off trusting the optimizer of your compiler.

Learn what your compiler does. Then let the compiler do it.

Answer 4

My standard answer when questions about assembly vs. high-level come up is to take a look at Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book.

The first couple of chapters give a good idea of what you can optimise effectively using assembly, and what you can't.

You can download it from GameDev - Jeff's links seem to be broken now unfortunately.

Answer 5

All good answers. My only additional point is that programmers tend to write a certain number of lines of code per day, regardless of language. Since the advantage of a high-level language is that it lets you get more done with less code, it takes incredible programmer discipline to actually write less code.

This is especially an issue for performance because it matters almost nowhere except in a tiny part of the code. It only matters in your hotspots - code that you write (1) consuming a significant fraction of execution time (2) without calling functions (3).

Answer 6

First of all, compilers generate very good (fast) assembly code.

It's true that compilers can add extra code since high order languages have mechanisms, like virtual methods and exceptions in C++. Thus the compiler will have to produce more code. There are cases where raw assembly could speed up the code but that's rare nowdays.

Answer 7

First - assembler should be used only in small code pieces, which eat most of the CPU time in a program - some kind of calculations for example - in the "bottle neck" of algorithm.

Secondly - it depends on experience in ASM of those who implements the same code in Assembler. If the assembler implementation of "bottle neck" code will be faster. If experience is low - it will be slower. And it will contain a lot of bugs. If experience is high enough - ASM will give significant profit.

Answer 8

How is assembly faster than compiled languages if both are translated to machine code?

The implicit assumption is hand-written assembly code. Of course, most compilers (e.g. GCC for C, C++, Fortran, Go, D etc...) are generating some assembler code; for example you might compile your foo.cc C++ source code with g++ -fverbose-asm -Wall -S -O2 -march=native foo.cc and look into the generated foo.s assembler code.

However, efficient assembler code is so difficult to write that, today, compilers can optimize better than human do. See this.

So practically speaking, it is not worth coding in assembler (also, take into account that development efforts cost very often much more than the hardware running the compiled code). Even when performance matters a lot and is worth spending a lot of money, it is better to hand-code only very few routines in assembler, or even to embed some assembler code in some of your C routines.

Look into the CppCon 2017 talk: Matt Godbolt “What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid”