It's much easier to read assembly code than to write it. You're only looking for the necessary performance in a few hot-spots. Everywhere else the convenience o

It's much easier to read assembly code than to write it. You're only looking for the necessary performance in a few hot-spots. Everywhere else the convenience of a high-level language is welcome. With the tail-call optimization, it's really only a fact of how programming languages are implemented that you need to look at the assembly. In a language that guarantees tail calls, or has a special tail-call keyword, you could forget about what's going on at the instruction level.