What is hand-coded assembly language used for these days?
DarkShikari: Anything that's worth spending time to do fast is worth spending time writing SIMD assembly for.You can get 5x, 10x, 20x, or more performance increases just by using the vector instructions given to you by the CPU.  Until a magic compiler appears that can make proper use of them (read: never), hand-coded assembly will be critical for almost any application for which performance is critical, especially multimedia processing.