Two points: * I read a lot of compiler-produced assembly -- these days it's often surprisingly clever. I don't think most developers could beat them with hand

Two points: * I read a lot of compiler-produced assembly -- these days it's often surprisingly clever. I don't think most developers could beat them with hand-coding even if they were willing to spend 10x-100x the time in development and debugging. * As other people on the thread have mentioned: it's all about the memory. In a world where a cache miss is going to cost ~100 cycles the actual instruction stream isn't even your biggest concern -- programming for performance increasingly means counting cache lines. I can do that just as well with C++ code as I could with assembly, at least as long as the compiler provides things like prefetch primitives, etc. There are still some super fast-path areas where expert assembly can beat a compiler (crypto algorithms, ...) but it just isn't attractive for most projects no matter how much developer time you're willing to spend.