Irrlicht Engine

ffs, didn't notice double post. Note to self: Always check post before loggin off, lol.

Yeah, you could write a whole game in assembly. If you were bloody good at it and had infinate time ( and patience ). For me, the closest I ever want to go to machine level is C thank you very much

Nothing beats hard-coded assembly for speed and power... doesn't mean I want to write my software in ASM

Actually hard-coded assembly that is done by anyone except an very good ASM programmer is going to be slower than a good, and properly configured, complier such as Intels, or Micrsofts. What you are saying used to be true but compliers are getting so good now that is is often very hard to outpreform them.

Also .NET languages can be speed up by compiling them into machine specific code instead of having them jitted.

I've written ASM for AVR microcontrollers (for those who don't know a microcontroller is a single chip with a low-speed CPU, small amount of memory, and assorted periferals such as UART, RTC, ADC, etc). It's not that ASM syntax is at all hard (though I suspect is a bit harder for PC processors, larger instruction set I suspect), in fact its easier syntax than C++. It just takes so bloody long to do anything and there's no real structure.