&gt; And why do you need to know the kind of assembly being generated? How much smarter than the compiler are you?<p>The compilers are actually quite stupid in the end. One has to know what kind of constructs the compiler can work well with and then change the problematic code to such that the compiler can produce efficient code out of.<p>This step comes after the profiler has pointed out the problematic spot.<p>Personally I find C++ code written in the modern style far more difficult to optimize than one that&#x27;s closer to C. And yeah, in soft realtime this does matter. It&#x27;s the difference between 20 and 60fps. It can easily be even the difference between 0.1 and 60fps.