Comment by magicalhippo

> I can get far more than 10x over naive C

However you can write better than naive C by compiling and watching the compiler output.

I stopped writing assembly back around y2k as I was fairly consistently getting beaten by the compiler when I wrote compiler-friendly high-level code. Memory organization is also something you can control fairly well on the high-level code side too.

Sure some niches remained, but for my projects the gains were very modest compared to invested time.