Because C is (mostly) portable, and assembler is not? Lately it became difficult to match C even using hand written assembly. Intel's C compiler will generate a

Because C is (mostly) portable, and assembler is not? Lately it became difficult to match C even using hand written assembly. Intel's C compiler will generate auto-vectorized auto-parallelized code (not as good as carefully written assembly, but much better than assembly a novice would write).