Cobra

[LooseCaboose]

But then again, why are the most widely used of libs in any language made in ASM?

Standard C library, possibly the most widely used library of them all is coded in C. Mesa3D OpenGL implementation is written in C, possibly with some asm code for the device drivers (as I mentioned earlier). Wine, which includes an implementation of most of the win32 api is written in C. The Allegro game library is a mixture of C and asm.

Most game libraries only require the drivers to be written in asm (there is no other way here) but the remaining code can be written in a high-level language.

If asm is so useless why was it used so much before computers had hundreds of megabytes of memory and cpus running at several ghz?

Can you remember where I said:

IMHO assembler is hardly worth learning these days unless you plan to do low level system or embedded programming.

Note the phrase "these days", of course it was necessary in days of yore. Modern computers on the other hand a blindingly fast and have plenty of memory to burn. Assembler is still very much required for embedded programming where memory and speed constraints are still an issue. Im talking about application development here.

And gcc isn't even such a good compiler, it's a okay compiler. I highly doubt it uses simd instructions. I'd have to see it to belive it.

It does support simd instructions. In saying that its a not a good compiler, you are taking the one sided approach of speed again. Yes Intel's C can easily produce faster object code, however gcc runs on a vast number of architectures, has a very good support community (last time I had a problem with it, I got a reply from one of the developers within an hour), a well designed extension set, and excellent integration with other tools (automake, xemacs, cvs, indent, etc). Thats why I use it, not because I want highly optomized object code.

And to whoever's using asm code, portability isn't an issue for them. Becuase who actually uses asm? Game developers, for consoles you have to use asm, for pc you're probably coding it for win32. A hobbist, i don't give a horses ass about portability. I don't even like *nix.

The same game developers who are now releasing their games (often simultaneously) for win32 PC's, the X-Box, PS/2, Dreamcast etc. Are you claiming that any asm code is portable here? For consoles you code in C just like for everything else, most probably cross-compiled from a PC. As a hobbyist you may not care about portability, but for anybody doing serious development these days its a big issue because there is no single target platform for anything now. Applications are faced with the challenge of running on win32 and *nix and games are faced with a vast array of consoles.

Looking to the future the x86 line may soon be dropped being replaced by the IA-64 architecture, which may have backward compatible IA-32 support , but definitely will not run 16 bit x86 code. Also asm goes completely out the window when you shift to Java or .NET unless you really feel compelled to code directly in byte code ;-)