skullgiver , 6 hours ago

From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.

I think that’s true for just about any programming languages, though the program you’re “compiling” is a human understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Things like val bar = foo.let { it.widget?.frub() ?: FrubFactory::defaultFrub(it) } don’t come naturally to the human mind, you’re already working through the logic required before you start typing.

As for the x86 instruction count: you don’t need to know all of them. For instance, here’s a quick graph of all of the instructions in systemctl on my system:

https://popplesburger.hilciferous.nl/pictrs/image/a35a14ee-93fa-45c7-ae88-95119c39cd2c.png

With the top 15 or maybe to 25 of these instructions, you can probably write any program you can think of, and what’s missing will probably be easily found (just search for “multiply” or “divide”). You don’t need to know punpckldq to write a program.