I think cryptography is one of the few places where it makes sense to do that. Because: * There's not that much code involved. * Many CPUs have instructions s

I think cryptography is one of the few places where it makes sense to do that. Because: * There's not that much code involved. * Many CPUs have instructions specifically made for accelerating cryptographic algorithms. * Security may have specific requirements from the code, such as not giving away any secrets through timing. This may require writing very specific, suboptimal code intentionally.