In Mac development, a large part of the code is related to handling the interface elements, and there is not much bloat or speed penalty for coding that up in a high level language. If you really need speed, the THINK C inline assembler is a very good choice - since you can refer directly to your variables etc, and it makes managing the stack much easier etc. Most of my coding was related to mathematical problems, so speed was certainly an issue, but a good knowledge of the compiler being used and the features of the language (C or Fortran mostly for my examples) meant tight loops could be very efficiently compiled and optimised. That being said, coding it in assembly would probably have roughly doubled the speed, but it was generally floating point code, and I always found floating point assembly hard to work with - largely because of the representation of the values and the associated difficulty debugging.

On the other hand, on my Apple 1 clone I never do anything in BASIC, but write everything in 6502 assembly. But I'm biased, since I wrote the assembler. [] ]'>