Why assembly?

There are a few reasons why you still might want to learn assembly in 2026.

Learning about the architecture: Assembly is as close as you can get to the hardware whilst still retaining something readable by humans. You have to understand how constructs such as stacks, loops etc. actually work, instead of having them abstracted away.

Optimisation: In theory, you might be able to output better assembly than the compiler for your programming language of choice if you know something really specific about the hardware or the application. The days when it was often worthwhile rewriting tight loops of programs (especially games) in assembly for performance are long gone though.

Access to new architectures: Pretty much everything has a C compiler nowadays, but if you get some absolutely hot off the press hardware you might be able to get going quicker with assembly.

Exploring old source code: Although assembly isn’t routinely used now, it was in the past, and if you’re into things like exploring the source code of retro games, you probably need to know at least some assembly.

Kernel development: Although most operating system kernels are written in C, they do occasionally use assembly. In the case of RISC OS, the traditional kernel contains a lot of ARM assembly, which makes porting it to 64 bit processors difficult.

Unless you have really specialist requirements, the main reason to learn assembly is as part of a wider computer science learning experience.