'The biggest speedup I've seen so far' — FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code

Tom's Hardware ^ | 17 July 2025 | Mark Tyson

[copaliscrossing]

When I went to school for computer programming, we had three languages. First was COBOL, second was RPGII, and third was Basic Assembler. Interestingly, I got my best grades in Basic Assembler and I’m not sure why. A lot of people questioned my sanity when they heard that... ha ha ha.

I haven’t used any of those three languages in my work career which will most likely be ending in 2 years.

[JAKraig]

COBOL and Assembler.......I learned IBM 360 versions of both in college in the ‘70’s,

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I decided to go back to school in the 70’s back when Z-80’s were popular. The z-80 was a pain to program because there were no registers larger than 8 bit, yeah there were a couple methods to fake a 16 bit register. You could get some real performance from the Z-80. Hand programming was the only way to get speed. I remember when Microsoft had the Microsoft Basic Assembler. It was very cool, it worked but when I saw the Z-Basic assembler run circles around MBASM I was converted. Assembler on a 360/370 was amazing, there were true 32 bit registers. You could do true multiply commands. Those were pretty interesting days.

The thing I hated about those days was that everything was done on a deck of cards. Get one card out of sequence and your compile would fail and the error report was sometimes meaningless.

[EQAndyBuzz]

“ I’ve been saying for years that the reason software eats up so much hardware (and its advances) is the compiler.”

Also the software/hardware interface. That’s what IBM’s AS/400 fixed.

[Harpotoo]

I learned assembler code in 1978 in the basement of the empire state building. Retired after 42 years in IT and loving it;-)

[Rifleman]

Wrote a ton of assembler and hand assembled machine code for 8086 and similar microcontroller processors back in the day. Always enjoyed it. Optimizing inner loops and memory was great geeky fun. Squeezing a table of trig function values by a factor of 8 is still a fond memory.

[whodathunkit]

You know you are old when you read through this article and understand it.

[cuban leaf]

The reason they let me rewrite it is because of what happened regarding the reason I was hired as contractor in the first place. They were adding area codes to the Seattle area and they hired a bunch of contractors to modify hard code and programs to add the new area codes and of course, the logic that each of these new area codes required.

Because all the area codes were hard coated in the logic are instructions were to, every time it was asking what area code it was for to know what to do, we were to add the new area codes, as well as the data points to apply to that particular call. Tax rates and things like that.

I was assigned 12 programs and each one had three to five places in the program where they asked the question and did something according to the area code. So what did I do? And all of them I created a table a area codes, and for each table entry where all of the data points that would be modified at various points in the program based on the table entry for the call the program is currently working on.

My contract lasted 2 years and a year after it ended the project manager for the next area code project literally called me at home and thanked me profusely. He said that the 12 programs I had modified only needed to have a new table row included for each of the new area codes. That was probably one of the most exciting parts of my career frankly.

Going to be clear, I made the tables large enough to be able to handle new area codes because, naturally, I figured they would be creating new area codes.