Blackfin is one of the things I looked at. I go quite a bit farther, with named variables, richer types (struct fields are named), block syntax, and generally capturing as much programmer intent as possible while maintaining an almost 1-1 mapping between statements and assembler instructions.
Time is a circle. Assembler could come back if it's an appealing target for LLMs. Currently it's not, but that's my hypothesis.
It is an appealing target for LLMs? Well, LLMs do make "handroll your hot paths in assembly for better performance" much more viable.
But that's a bit of a problem too?
Because, unlike humans, LLMs have no trouble whatsoever recalling all the mnemonics. Hell, they can often recall all the opcodes and encodings too and disassemble from hex "manually".
So if the primary advantage of this syntax is better human-readability and human-understandability? The need for it in a future where low level assembly routines are written by LLMs in a perf evaluation loop isn't that great.
Time is a circle. Assembler could come back if it's an appealing target for LLMs. Currently it's not, but that's my hypothesis.