Building on Volume 1, this book guides experienced programmers through advanced assembly techniques often overlooked in introductory texts.Every high-level language feature you depend on—objects, exceptions, closures, coroutines—compiles down to assembly instructions someone designed deliberately. Most programmers never see those decisions.
The Art of 64-Bit Assembly, Volume 2 makes them visible.
Randall Hyde, whose work on assembly language has shaped how a generation of systems programmers thinks about x86, picks up exactly where Volume 1 ended. No review. No concessions. Every chapter takes a construct you’ve used in C++, Python, or Rust and shows you the assembly underneath it—built from scratch, in MASM, running under Windows.
What you’ll build:
- Object-oriented programs in MASM—vtables, method dispatch, inheritance—directly from assembly
- Windows structured exception handling (SEH) installed and managed at the instruction level
- Thunks, closures, and iterators that behave like higher-order functions—in a language with none
- Coroutines, generators, and fibers without having to resort to HLL code
- Concurrent programs with real synchronization, directly from assembly language
- Unicode string handling done correctly, at the level where most code gets it wrong
- Domain-specific macro languages inside MASM, built from first principles
This is the book for programmers who already know assembly and want to stop taking the hard parts on faith. No magic. No shortcuts. No runtime to blame.
Covers x86-64 assembly language