我想说的是，当你比编译器更擅长一组给定的指令时。所以我认为没有通用的答案

以下是我个人经历中的几个例子:

Access to instructions that are not accessible from C. For instance, many architectures (like x86-64, IA-64, DEC Alpha, and 64-bit MIPS or PowerPC) support a 64 bit by 64 bit multiplication producing a 128 bit result. GCC recently added an extension providing access to such instructions, but before that assembly was required. And access to this instruction can make a huge difference on 64-bit CPUs when implementing something like RSA - sometimes as much as a factor of 4 improvement in performance. Access to CPU-specific flags. The one that has bitten me a lot is the carry flag; when doing a multiple-precision addition, if you don't have access to the CPU carry bit one must instead compare the result to see if it overflowed, which takes 3-5 more instructions per limb; and worse, which are quite serial in terms of data accesses, which kills performance on modern superscalar processors. When processing thousands of such integers in a row, being able to use addc is a huge win (there are superscalar issues with contention on the carry bit as well, but modern CPUs deal pretty well with it). SIMD. Even autovectorizing compilers can only do relatively simple cases, so if you want good SIMD performance it's unfortunately often necessary to write the code directly. Of course you can use intrinsics instead of assembly but once you're at the intrinsics level you're basically writing assembly anyway, just using the compiler as a register allocator and (nominally) instruction scheduler. (I tend to use intrinsics for SIMD simply because the compiler can generate the function prologues and whatnot for me so I can use the same code on Linux, OS X, and Windows without having to deal with ABI issues like function calling conventions, but other than that the SSE intrinsics really aren't very nice - the Altivec ones seem better though I don't have much experience with them). As examples of things a (current day) vectorizing compiler can't figure out, read about bitslicing AES or SIMD error correction - one could imagine a compiler that could analyze algorithms and generate such code, but it feels to me like such a smart compiler is at least 30 years away from existing (at best).

On the other hand, multicore machines and distributed systems have shifted many of the biggest performance wins in the other direction - get an extra 20% speedup writing your inner loops in assembly, or 300% by running them across multiple cores, or 10000% by running them across a cluster of machines. And of course high level optimizations (things like futures, memoization, etc) are often much easier to do in a higher level language like ML or Scala than C or asm, and often can provide a much bigger performance win. So, as always, there are tradeoffs to be made.

我很惊讶居然没人这么说。如果用汇编编写strlen()函数，速度会快得多!在C中，你能做的最好的事情就是

int c;
for(c = 0; str[c] != '\0'; c++) {}

在组装过程中，你可以大大加快速度:

mov esi, offset string
mov edi, esi
xor ecx, ecx

lp:
mov ax, byte ptr [esi]
cmp al, cl
je  end_1
cmp ah, cl
je end_2
mov bx, byte ptr [esi + 2]
cmp bl, cl
je end_3
cmp bh, cl
je end_4
add esi, 4
jmp lp

end_4:
inc esi

end_3:
inc esi

end_2:
inc esi

end_1:
inc esi

mov ecx, esi
sub ecx, edi

长度单位是ecx。这一次比较4个字符，所以速度快4倍。并且考虑使用eax和ebx的高阶词，它将比之前的C例程快8倍!

C语言常常需要做一些从汇编编码员的角度看来不必要的事情，这只是因为C标准这么说。

例如，整数提升。如果你想在C语言中移动一个char变量，人们通常会期望代码实际上只做一个比特的移动。

然而，标准强制编译器在移位之前将符号扩展为int，然后将结果截断为char，这可能会使代码复杂化，这取决于目标处理器的架构。

，问了这个问题，并给出了使用汇编的利弊。

这很难具体地回答，因为这个问题非常不具体:到底什么是“现代编译器”?

理论上，几乎任何手动的汇编器优化都可以由编译器来完成——实际上它是否已经完成，不能笼统地说，只能说特定编译器的特定版本。许多可能需要花费大量的精力来确定它们是否可以在特定的上下文中应用而不产生副作用，以至于编译器编写者不会为它们烦恼。