Does anyone still use assembly?

[LocoCoyote]

Just curious. Seems to be a lot of talk going on here, but Assembly seems to be missing.

[David_Jones]

Haven't used assembly since I packed away my Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the late 80's.

David.

[aym]

I learned some assembly for the Intel 8080 a year ago, never used it then, I just prefer to use high level languages like C or Java.

[Fraughton]

I'm learning assembly for PIC controllers, but there are C compilers for them as well.

[Paul Victorey]

For the x86, I have developed subroutines in assembly for computationally expensive operations, to take advantage of MMX and other advanced features that compilers won't use.

For the PIC microcontrollers I use, I only code in assembly. There are usually quite elegant ways of generating quite efficient code, plus you can very easily determine the exact number of instruction clock cycles that your code will take, so if you are writing a program that must run under realtime constraints, it's easy to figure out if you can actually accomplish the task in the time you have available. If each instruction takes one microsecond (as in any of the midrange 4 MHz MCUs), and you need to complete a set of tasks in 500 microseconds, assembly allows you to easily calculate your worst case scenario (the longest path). It's not possible to do that in C, because it's not obvious how long a given set of instructions will take.