sgift, dealing with big vs small endian is a ways away from dealing with different opcodes and instruction sets like SSE and whatnot. It's not far smaller. It's

sgift, dealing with big vs small endian is a ways away from dealing with different opcodes and instruction sets like SSE and whatnot. It's not far smaller. It's huge. You aren't speaking from experience. As someone who used to do reverse engineering and knows assembly first-hand, I'm not going to argue with you about the different between writing code in assembly versus C. You're incorrect to say that ASM and C are so close. There's a reason why certain routines are implemented in CPU architecture specific asm, and that's for speed. Because C is still too high up to make many optimizations. The lack of fine-grained-ness is definitely there, in regard to the processor instructions used.