In my experience, reading assembly, and being able to anticipate roughly what the compiler is going to produce is much more important than writing assembly. Le

In my experience, reading assembly, and being able to anticipate roughly what the compiler is going to produce is much more important than writing assembly. Learning to write a bit makes you better at reading it. Next time you have some tricky inner loop showing up in profiles, write a few alternative implementations, benchmark each, and use the -S flag to get gcc/clang to dump out assembly. There are some people who write a lot of assembly language, but I think orders of magnitude more people read assembly regularly while writing it rarely.