An assembler programmer at full attention can beat a compiler at most operations. That said, the average level of attention a compiler can give over the whole

An assembler programmer at full attention can beat a compiler at most operations. That said, the average level of attention a compiler can give over the whole program is much greater than an assembly programmer. When performance is the ultimate goal it makes sense to only drop into assembler for your inner loop. However assembly programmers will also instinctively avoid things that result in massive amounts of code because they have to manually write every line of it. Compared to C++ where templates are effectively a code generation meta-language. C makes you work a lot harder to generate huge amounts of machine code - and its binaries tend to be smaller because of it.