One thing I always loved about C was how easily you could slip in and out of x86 assembler with the __asm__ tag. There is no ceremony & it seems like magic. Lik

One thing I always loved about C was how easily you could slip in and out of x86 assembler with the __asm__ tag. There is no ceremony & it seems like magic. Like if you have 3 C int's a,b & c, and you want to add a & b and store the result in c, you would do: __asm__ ( "addl %%ebx, %%eax;" : "=a" (c) : "a" (a) , "b" (b) ); Then you could just continue in C as if nothing had happened, and a printf("%d",c) would give you the right result. When I worked as a quant, I saw such code snippets quite frequently. Those days (late 90s early 2k), individual programmers had a certain amount of freedom that is completely missing today. You would have a cohesive team with a C programmer, java programmer, a sysadmin, an R guy, a kdb/q quant - no issues. The front end was all java awt widgets, and you would jni to do the hard bits. jni would pull in the C code, which was peppered with little bits of __asm__ to speed things up. Everytime you needed to interact with the outer ecosystem, C would do an fwrite to the file system, then R would pick up the file, do its montecarlo simulations & write back to the filesystem, the algotrading bits would be in q, and even the sysadmin had his share of awk/sed to massage all the back & forth data. It was smooth & nice & pulled 100x its weight. Best of all, the individual programmers had respect for each other's skills & would learn from each other. These days, some asshole CIO would fire the whole bunch & replace them with 10 pythonistas & insist everything should be coded in one true language - and as one of those pythonistas, while I am happy I still have a job in this recession, it is kinda sad, those languages were so much more fun & it was exciting to watch the interplay of different languages bearing their own strengths, whereas python otoh is so terribly boring & everyday is same verbose torch.autograd.Function crap oh well back to the coal mines.