[The Godfather]

I remember it was a big selling point in the pre-G3 days. Then, Steve announced iMovie for the G3 or G4 that slashed transitions and DVD encoding to 0.5x with presumably assembly magic.
After that last flash in the pan, either compilers became as fast as assembly, or the last PPC assembly girl died of old age, or software managers didn't see the payout of 2-4x faster software, or something else.
In the intel era, no assembly optimized software ever saw the light.

[CharlesS]

Well, you can't really know whether an app was written in assembly or something else without looking at the source code. Some parts of the OS may well include assembly code — I would particularly expect it in Rosetta, since emulation technology often needs to be as fast as possible.

The thing about assembly that makes it often undesirable, though, besides the fact that the optimizer can often do very well these days, is the fact that it ties you inextricably to the current hardware platform. If you'd had any code written in assembly during the PPC days, you would have had to completely rewrite that code after the Intel switch. And then a few years later, you'd have to port it again to x86_64, which isn't as drastically different as PPC to i386, but still does have changes. If you wanted to take code from your project and port it to a smartphone, whoops, time for another rewrite.

[Spheric Harlot]

Word has it that BJ writes the drivers for my audio interface in assembler - which is one reason why Metric Halo boxes were among those unfazed by the Lucent/Agere Firewire chipset revision two years ago that "broke" a lot of interfaces.

Apparently, some coders know how the actual hardware works and what specs actually mean - and most don't.

[11011001]

Some other points:
- Assembly is notoriously difficult to maintain.
- The time spent optimizing code paths in assembly could be better spent optimizing cache efficiency, or on parallelization.
- It's a highly specialized skill that most programmers (including good programmers) don't have, nor need anymore.

[Mac Write]

Spinrite

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by Mac Write 

Spinrite

I think everything by Steve Gibson is written is assembly. All of his software is windows only though, isn't it?

Do you listen to Security Now by any chance?

[mduell]

Handbrake uses x264 which contains lots of hand generated asm because gcc/icc are retarded for dsp-like work.

[ghporter]

...on the other hand, most compilers are heavily tweaked to maximize efficiency of output code, often by using pre-built chunks of ASM, but also by analyzing the source code and fixing dumb programmer tricks (redundancies, stupid loops that should be different structures, etc.). For the majority of programs, this tends to provide a whole lot of bang for the buck. For special stuff, like "DSP-like work" as mduell points out, you need an expert programmer to provide the ASM magic because the compiler just can't.

[olePigeon]

Companies are about rapid release cycles and features. With computers getting faster and cheaper, they don't really optimize the code anymore. Most software is "good enough" and your average consumers doesn't know any better or doesn't care.

WriteNow! was hand-coded 68K assembly. That software was fast - even on an 8MHz Mac Plus with 1MB of RAM. I preferred that to Word, in its day.