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

You don't actually know whether your well-written C code is really fast if you haven't looked at the disassembly of what compiler produces. Many times you look at it and see that "well-written" was subjective.

So it's not necessary to write in assembler to get fastest code ever, but it's certainly worth to know assembler for the very same reason.