Summary

Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C language, said C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of… assembly language. In this chapter you saw that in some cases you may have to use assembly language to achieve the desired results. Although assembly is a very powerful language that provides an unobfuscated view of the machine capabilities, it can make maintenance significantly more difficult as by definition assembly language targets a specific architecture. However, assembly code or built-in functions would typically be found in very small portions of your application, where performance is critical, and therefore maintenance should remain relatively easy. If you carefully select which part of your application should be written in Java, which part should be written in C, and which part should be written in assembly, you can make sure your application's performance is astonishing and impresses your users.