3D engine programmers have to care a little about execution speed, but what about the programmers at ATI and nVidia ? How much do they need to optimize their driver applications ?
Are there jobs out there who only purpose is execution speed and optimisation, or jobs for people to program only in assembly ?
Please, no flame war about "premature optimisation is the root of all evil", I just want to know if such jobs exists, maybe in security ? In kernel programming ? Where ? Not at all ?
Best Answer
One sector that I would've never thought of before I read about it (and it was years ago, so I don't have the link unfortunately) is the Defense sector. Military contractors are used to help with the nations cyber-defense and also launch cyber attacks. Now, I know one of the big contractors wanted people who knew assembly, although I'm not sure how much they would have you use it.
Another field is the embedded electronics. While some of those architectures are programmed for in C, you would still be able to use assembly for them and that would probably be where most of the jobs would be in assembly.