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That sounds like it was a lot of fun but I'm wondering what assembly gave you that was not available in e.g. C? My understanding is that most compilers can out-optimise the average developer, so are you an above-average developer (well I guess you are) or did assembly enable you to do something that was difficult in a higher level language? Or was it more about the challenge (which I'm totally on board with by the way)?

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> My understanding is that most compilers can out-optimise the average developer

Do you happen to know where (what source) you got that from? I'm genuinely curious, as to my knowledge, compilers are generally still easily fooled by things that causes them unable to vectorize code or factor out conditional jumps.

To give an example here, see Mike Actons' talk below (from about 43:10 onwards) in which he describes the compiler failures.

https://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?t=2590

No specific source I could point to really, just that I've been hanging around message boards like this for a long time. I didn't mean to say it's impossible to beat a compiler or they don't have any blind spots, but thanks for the link - sounds interesting :-)

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