When is assembly faster than C?

Question

One of the stated reasons for knowing assembler is that, on occasion, it can be employed to write code that will be more performant than writing that code in a higher-level

Answer 1

Short answer? Sometimes.

Technically every abstraction has a cost and a programming language is an abstraction for how the CPU works. C however is very close. Years ago I remember laughing out loud when I logged onto my UNIX account and got the following fortune message (when such things were popular):

The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language.

It's funny because it's true: C is like portable assembly language.

It's worth noting that assembly language just runs however you write it. There is however a compiler in between C and the assembly language it generates and that is extremely important because how fast your C code is has an awful lot to do with how good your compiler is.

When gcc came on the scene one of the things that made it so popular was that it was often so much better than the C compilers that shipped with many commercial UNIX flavours. Not only was it ANSI C (none of this K&R C rubbish), was more robust and typically produced better (faster) code. Not always but often.

I tell you all this because there is no blanket rule about the speed of C and assembler because there is no objective standard for C.

Likewise, assembler varies a lot depending on what processor you're running, your system spec, what instruction set you're using and so on. Historically there have been two CPU architecture families: CISC and RISC. The biggest player in CISC was and still is the Intel x86 architecture (and instruction set). RISC dominated the UNIX world (MIPS6000, Alpha, Sparc and so on). CISC won the battle for the hearts and minds.

Anyway, the popular wisdom when I was a younger developer was that hand-written x86 could often be much faster than C because the way the architecture worked, it had a complexity that benefitted from a human doing it. RISC on the other hand seemed designed for compilers so noone (I knew) wrote say Sparc assembler. I'm sure such people existed but no doubt they've both gone insane and been institutionalized by now.

Instruction sets are an important point even in the same family of processors. Certain Intel processors have extensions like SSE through SSE4. AMD had their own SIMD instructions. The benefit of a programming language like C was someone could write their library so it was optimized for whichever processor you were running on. That was hard work in assembler.

There are still optimizations you can make in assembler that no compiler could make and a well written assembler algoirthm will be as fast or faster than it's C equivalent. The bigger question is: is it worth it?

Ultimately though assembler was a product of its time and was more popular at a time when CPU cycles were expensive. Nowadays a CPU that costs $5-10 to manufacture (Intel Atom) can do pretty much anything anyone could want. The only real reason to write assembler these days is for low level things like some parts of an operating system (even so the vast majority of the Linux kernel is written in C), device drivers, possibly embedded devices (although C tends to dominate there too) and so on. Or just for kicks (which is somewhat masochistic).