> (setting timers, interrupts, system registers, and whatnot) Yes, you're right. Some of those can occasionally be accessed via memory mapped registers, but a

> (setting timers, interrupts, system registers, and whatnot) Yes, you're right. Some of those can occasionally be accessed via memory mapped registers, but at least some inline assembly should be expected/required for most architectures. So it's not merely performance. Though it also makes sense for some critical tasks to be tuned via intrinsics or assembly.