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