>It's not really possible to write hand-coded assembler that's faster anymore.
That is wrong. Just because you didn’t succeed in writing faster code in one case, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. See e.g. [1] on why the Lua vm is written in assembly. It’s from 2011 but not much has changed in the meantime.
Lisp people might recognise the name of one of the main Snabb authors, Luke Gorrie. He started Slime. Always fun to see what he's up to. Andy Wingo, the presenter of the talk, works on Guile.
That is wrong. Just because you didn’t succeed in writing faster code in one case, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. See e.g. [1] on why the Lua vm is written in assembly. It’s from 2011 but not much has changed in the meantime.
[1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html