> Until about 10 years ago, hand crafted Assembler was still faster than C, and the speed improvements were actually needed.
It still is, especially when it comes to vectorization.
And in other areas, but that's largely because C isn't expressive enough, not because we lack the engineering know-how to compile fast vectorisation code.
You're writing on a computer magnitudes faster than the fastest computers of the 70s, with significant compiler improvement to boot.
Until about 10 years ago, hand crafted Assembler was still faster than C, and the speed improvements were actually needed.
This "let's write a text editor which is pretty much an advanced nano/pico in JS and have it take up 145MB" is only possible when everyone has a supercomputer in their hands anyways