[georgeecollins]

In the mid 90's teams I led wrote code in assembly for things that were very performance intensive, in particular 3D rendering without 3D cards. There was also a need to write in assembly for the PS2, which had a very complicated and idiosyncratic architecture. In both cases you were really desperate for every bit of performance you could get and you didn't necessarily trust compilers to make optimal code. Since then compilers have improved and CPUs are much smarter about predicting what memory they will need.

Also, Microsoft Visual C became good, but it was not before version 4. I remember watching a team at Activision literally take more than an hour to compile their game. Perhaps they were doing something wrong, but similar teams had much less of a problem when 4.0 came out. You cannot imagine what a drag that is to a team's productivity and creativity.