You've captured exactly what it feels like -- this is the constant tension among asm developers. I love really high performance code, but I also like accomplish

You've captured exactly what it feels like -- this is the constant tension among asm developers. I love really high performance code, but I also like accomplishing more than one trivial thing per hour. It's hard to even remember the time before I knew C, when coding in assembly was all there was. When it was "normal." But I do remember the first time I wrote for the M68000 chipset and finding a multiply and divide instruction. "What? I don't have to write my own divide routine?" Tears of joy! I will typically build something out in a high level language, profile to see where the time is going, and take a closer look at the algorithm first to see if it's sensible or some different approach should be taken. If it's an appropriate algo, then it's time to look at the implementation to see where we can shave cycles. For the most part, even if you're talking to hardware that requires exceedingly precise timing (interface/bus protocols, certain chips), C will probably do the job. (It's no coincidence it was referred to as "universal assembly language".) Only where one is absolutely starved for resources (as the NES, and many 8-bit systems were/are) is ASM necessary. "high level when you can, assembly when you must"