[...] But my application-coded debugging brain kept looking at abstractions like they would provide all the answers. I rationally knew that the abstractions wouldn’t help, but my instincts hadn’t gotten the message.
That feels like the wrong takeaway for me. Assembly still runs on abstractions: You're ignoring the CPU microcode, the physical interaction with memory modules, etc. If the CPU communicates with other devices, this has more similarities with network calls and calling the "high level APIs" of those devices. For user space assembly, the entire kernel is abstracted away and system calls are essentially "stdlib functions".
So I think it has a different execution model, something like "everything is addressable byte strings and operates on addressable byte strings". But you can get that execution model occasionally in high-level languages as well, e.g. in file handling or networking code. (Or in entire languages built around it like brainfuck)
So I think assembly is just located a few levels lower in the abstraction pile, but it's still abstractions all the way down...
Ya totally I can also keep 32 registers, a memory file, and stack pointer all in my head at once ...fellow human... (In 2026 I might actually be an LLM in which I really can keep all that context in my "head"!)
Contrast this with trying to figure out all the nested implicit actions that a single line of some HLL like C++ will do.
Abstractions do exist (disagreeing with the single other post in here) and they also exist in most flavours of assembly, because assembly itself is still an abstraction for machine code. A very thin one, sure, but assemblers will generally provide a fair amount of syntactic sugar on top, if you want to make use of it.
Protip: your functions should be padded with instructions that'll trap if you miss a return.
Galaxy brained protip: instead of a trap, use return instructions as padding, that way it will just work correctly!
Some compilers insert trap instructions when aligning the start of functions, mainly because the empty space has to be filled with something, and it's better to use a trapping instruction if for some reason this unreachable code is ever jumped to. But if you have to do it manually, it doesn't really help, since it's easier to forget than the return.
> In Sum# > Abstractions. They don’t exist in assembler. Memory is read from registers and the stack and written to registers and the stack.
Abstractions do not exist periodi. They are patterns, but these patterns aren’t isolated from each other. This is how a hacker is born, through this deconstruction.
It’s just like the fact that electrons and protons don’t really exist. but the patterns in energy gradients are consistent enough to give them names and model their relationship. There are still points where these models fail (QM and GR at plank scale, or just the classical-quantum boundaries). It’s gradients all the way down, and even that is an abstraction layer.
Equipped with this understanding you can make an exploit like Rowhammer.
Now, there are abstractions (which exist in your brain, whatever the language) and tools to represent abstractions (in ASM you've got macros and JSR/RET; both pretty leaky).