alt Hacker News* it is very hard for a good engineer to beat compilers these days (they are very good now).*
I keep hearing this for the last 20 odd years, yet I see evidence to the contrary each and every day. It is hard and honest work though.
* it is very hard for a good engineer to beat compilers these days (they are very good now).*
I keep hearing this for the last 20 odd years, yet I see evidence to the contrary each and every day. It is hard and honest work though.
A good engineer isn't a godlike entity who knows all. They know when to bring in assembly and when to be satisfied with C / C++ / Rust compilers and steer the compiler.
Assembly has unique advantages like guaranteed execution duration for cryptography or exact optimization of hot-loop computation.
99% of the even performance-sensive code doesn't need assembly and compilers beat good engineers in this category since API surface is big and complicated. For 1% very hot code or very sensitive code due to execution duration / predictability / throughput, humans usually code better than compilers. This is due to specialization and limited DoF problems that can be solved and optimized to hell.