Nice post. It really surprises me that someone who writes assembly for fun doesn't know that dividing by constants can be done faster, nor that dividing/multipl

Nice post. It really surprises me that someone who writes assembly for fun doesn't know that dividing by constants can be done faster, nor that dividing/multiplying by powers of two can be done even faster. On the topic of hand-optimizing or not: There always seem to be two camps. The first say: "Never bother with assembly. Let the compiler do optimizing. If anything, try to write code that the compiler can optimize.". The second camp always states something like "It is not that hard to outperform the compiler.". I guess the complicated pipeline models are mostly the reason for the complexity. I'm not sure how much compilers do to avoid pipeline stalls though. For example, how detailed the execution model that they use is. It shouldn't be too complicated, since most compilers (as far as I know) don't differentiate between different processors, while different processors have a different execution model.