When I was writing some ASM for a microcontroller to do string <--> float conversion, I could find almost nothing on how to best perform the operations.

There were essentially three ways to do it. Muddle through with a naive implementation. Look at the ASM of an old 8-bit machine. The final category was the by far the most dominant suggestion, to the point that anything else is almost like lost knowledge now. That solution was to use the C standard functions.

It seems like this is a sufficiently unpleasant task that as soon as anyone didn't absolutely have to do it all themselves, the punted to a black box solution.

There's probably something to be said there about the plethora of hobbiest 3d engines in comparison.