a person can also (at the assembly level) do very
tricky things via repurposing instructions to perform
tasks they were perhaps not originally intended to
perform. also, scheduling a pipeline by hand can
really lead to some clever and creative ideas that
no compiler would ever find.
very painful to fix later, but if you're writing in assembly,
it's likely that you're not prototyping.
i did this for an IDEA (encryption) routine once, and
was heartbroken to discover that it was less than a
10% increase in speed over the optimized C routine.
on the other hand, there are places and times where
a little assembly can go a very, very long way. i seem
to recall (although i'm probably misremembering this)
that if you need to copy more than a page worth of data
on a pentium, directly using assembly is ridiculously faster
than, say, memcpy in C, because there's a special-purpose
assembly instruction to do just that.
s.
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