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Languages are usually described in terms of being “high level” or “low level”. This is usually presented as a tradeoff, and as a programmer you’re obliged to pick your poison.

High vs. Low Level Programming

If you’re not a programmer, then I need to make it clear that these two concepts are probably the opposite of what you’d expect. A high-level language sounds like something for advanced programmers, and a low-level language sounds like something for beginners. But in classic engineer thinking, these paradigms are named from the perspective of the machinery, not the people using them.

A low-level language is said to be “close to the metal”. Your code is involved with manipulating individual blocks of memory and worrying about processor cycles. It’s very fussy work and it takes a lot of code to get anything done, but when you’ve got it written you can be confident that it will be incredibly efficientAssuming you’re knowledgeable and experienced, you didn’t create any major bugs, and the limitations of the target platform were made clear to you and were accurate. You know, the usual.. 

A high-level language allows you to express complex actions using very simple bits of easily-written code. It’s easy to write, but often wastes processor cycles and memory. How much? There are arguments all the time over whether the overhead for language X is significant or trivialAnd I’ll bet your viewpoint depends on your domain..

If you want to output the phrase “Hello World!” to the console, then here is how you do that using assembler, the lowest of the low-level languages:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Programming Vexations Part 4: High Level vs. Low Level”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.