[locknitpicker]

> The difference is that now it is worthless

Writing whole software projects in assembly has been worthless and pointless for a couple of decades now. Even the projects who can put together a solid case will limit assembly to very specific components executed only in specific bits of a hot path. Perhaps the most performance-sensitive code we have today is high frequency trading and that field is dominated by C++.

Also, virtually all mainstream compiler suites have flags that output assembly,and that feature is largely ignored and unused.

[Pannoniae]

That's just not true... the flags to get preprocessed output and assembly are quite useful and used a fair bit, in fact. Multiple reasons - sanitychecking your code, finding bugs, or even finding compiler errors.

[wtetzner]

The point is that these projects had worth because of what the programmer got out of the learning process, not because of the end result.

[layer8]

A lot of FFmpeg is written in assembly, and a lot of things are using FFmpeg in the backend.