Low-level programming language

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (March 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Low-level programming language" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture, memory or underlying physical hardware; commands or functions in the language are structurally similar to a processor's instructions. These languages provide the programmer with full control over program memory and the underlying machine code instructions. Because of the low level of abstraction (hence the term "low-level") between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware". Programs written in low-level languages tend to be relatively non-portable, due to being optimized for a certain type of system architecture.^[1][2][3][4]

Low-level languages are directly converted to machine code with or without a compiler or interpreter—second-generation programming languages^[5][6] depending on programming language. A program written in a low-level language can be made to run very quickly, with a small memory footprint. A program that written with those programming languages often end up becoming architecture dependent or operating system dependent, due to using low level APIs.^[1]