MIPS - Is it important?

Question

My question: Is the MIPS programming language that benificial to know?

I'm a CS student and am taking a assembly class which focuses on MIPS. I'm very comfortable writing in high level languages, but Mips has me a little bit down.

Is MIPS something that I should really focus on and try to completely grasp it? Will it help me in the future?

Answer 1

At one point (in the 90s) MIPS-derived processors were the best selling processors in the world, dwarfing sales of Intel x86 processors. This was because of their huge presence in the embedded market. I think now ARM-based processors may have taken over that title, but there are still tons of embedded systems out there using MIPS.

Even if you never program a MIPS chip in assembler in your career, assembly language can be useful to learn. It can help you write more efficient high level code if you have some idea of what the compiler is going to emit. Other areas where it is still used include compilers (writing your own), device drivers, and multimedia programming (where code requiring MMX or SSE is usually still written by hand in assembler).

Each CPU type has a different instruction set but there's enough commonality that once you learn one dialect of assembly (MIPS in your case) the others should be easy to pick up.