Personally I don't find inline-asm with gcc to be all that bad. It is definitely a very nice way of accessing other-wise inaccessible CPU instructions - and tho

Personally I don't find inline-asm with gcc to be all that bad. It is definitely a very nice way of accessing other-wise inaccessible CPU instructions - and those tend to be generally trivial to implement (IE. Single asm instruction, along with some input and output operands). I admit that on the rare occasion that I do use it, I almost always go reread the documentation. But still, the compiled end result is tons better then having to call a completely separate function in your code every time you just want to use one single CPU instruction. That said, for longer pieces of code, I definitely avoid inline-asm and just use a separate assembly file. There's no debating it's a cleaner solution when you have more then one or a few lines of assembly. And really, besides those obscure CPU instructions, your written assembly is usually not much different, then the stuff generated from some C code. It's worth using C wherever it's viable.