The language wasn't mentioned but often the alternative to assembler is C. C compilers beating hand written assembly comes up in pretty much every discussion of

The language wasn't mentioned but often the alternative to assembler is C. C compilers beating hand written assembly comes up in pretty much every discussion of the subject. You can still beat the compiler in many cases if you iterate and analyze enough, but that won't be the case in the first-pass code you'd write. There are some exceptions in areas where compilers have weaknesses, like SIMD code. The thread context is ClojureScript and JavaScript, I think people don't compare JSVM JIT code to hand written assembly that often (tip: node --print-opt-code --print-opt-code-filter=myfunction).