Second Volume of 'Art of 64-Bit Assembly' Rebuilds High-Level Constructs in MASM

The second volume of Randall Hyde’s The Art of 64-Bit Assembly takes language features that most programmers use as black boxes—objects, exceptions, closures, coroutines, and concurrency—and reconstructs each one by hand in MASM running on Windows. Rather than describing these constructs abstractly, every chapter strips away the runtime and shows exactly what happens at the instruction level, making design decisions like vtable layout, method dispatch, and inheritance explicit rather than assumed.

The coverage is deliberately Windows-specific and practical: readers install and manage structured exception handling (SEH) directly, implement thunks and iterators that mimic higher-order functions, build generators and fibers without dropping into a high-level language, and write concurrent code with real synchronization primitives. It also tackles areas where higher-level code routinely gets things wrong, such as correct Unicode string handling and building domain-specific macro languages inside MASM from first principles.

The book is pitched at readers who already know assembly and want to stop treating the hard parts as received wisdom. Its framing leans on a pointed critique of AI-generated explanations: a model can produce a plausible account of how vtables work, but not what Windows actually expects or what breaks when you violate convention—precisely the gap this volume aims to close through hands-on, instruction-level reconstruction.