In a past life, I worked in an industry where just about all components of our large software system were written in C++. Lots of multithreading, memory alloca

In a past life, I worked in an industry where just about all components of our large software system were written in C++. Lots of multithreading, memory allocations, deallocations, etc. If there is one thing C++ developers know better than the language itself, it's debuggers and memory dumps. We used tools like windbg and gdb almost as much as the IDE. Often, crash dumps from our release binaries didn't have enough inbuilt information to find the cause of the crash. We would then have to do things like walking the stack manually. For doing that effectively, it was necessary to understand x86 internals to figure out what the disassembled code is doing. This is probably the likeliest way most native application developers run into assembly language. Always helps to know it well.