Back in the DOS days, inline ASM had more benefits than just a potential speed increase -- Since hardware was directly accessible under DOS, it would allow you to actually extend the capabilities of your program itself, and add new functionality that could not be accomplished with the built-in commands of many languages.
For example: PowerBASIC for DOS only had native support for screenmodes up to 640x480, in 16 colors.
Using inline ASM, I was able to interface with VESA video adapters directly, and enable hi-res 256 and true-color screenmodes, among others.
Nowadays I think inline ASM is of a much more limited use than back then, since windows 2000/XP/etc no longer allows applications to access hardware directly.
Sure, you can 'optimize' certain code by hand-coding it in ASM, but it does take an awful long time to do so, for relatively little gain with todays' efficient compilers.
In most (not all, but most) cases, it's simply not worth the time spent on it.
For example: PowerBASIC for DOS only had native support for screenmodes up to 640x480, in 16 colors.
Using inline ASM, I was able to interface with VESA video adapters directly, and enable hi-res 256 and true-color screenmodes, among others.
Nowadays I think inline ASM is of a much more limited use than back then, since windows 2000/XP/etc no longer allows applications to access hardware directly.
Sure, you can 'optimize' certain code by hand-coding it in ASM, but it does take an awful long time to do so, for relatively little gain with todays' efficient compilers.
In most (not all, but most) cases, it's simply not worth the time spent on it.