I've always thought that the standard wisdom is that most developers can't beat the compiler by hand-writing most of their code in ASM, but in things like game

I've always thought that the standard wisdom is that most developers can't beat the compiler by hand-writing most of their code in ASM, but in things like game development, things start higher level Lua, C++, C and work their way down to increase performance as bottlenecks are found. Compilers are like Google or Wikipedia, 99% of the time they know more than 99% of developers.